44i ? 



P 



72L 



THE ENGLISH SCENE 

IN THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY 



!By the Same Jluthor 
ROBERT HARLEY 

Earl of Oxford 

A Study of Politics and Letters in the Age of Anne 

^y the Same Jluthor and Helen Clergue 

GEORGE SELWYN 

His Letters and His Life 



THE ENGLISH SCENE 

IN THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY 



BY 

E. S. ROSCOE 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 

G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 

1912 






PRINTED BY 
HAZBLI,, WATSON AND VINEY, LD. 
M)NDON AND AYLESBURY, 
ENGLAND 



THOMAS SECCOMBE 

THE FRIENDLY CRITIC AND THE CRITICAL FRIEND 



PREFATORY NOTE 

In one of his later essays Sir Leslie Stephen com- 
plained that too much value is placed on the publica- 
tion of minute new facts relating to the history 
of the eighteenth century. The aim of students 
of the society of that age should be, he went on to 
say, to systemize the materials which are already 
in existence ; in other words, to form a clear and 
general view of the age. His last work, " English 
Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century," 
is an admirable example of the practical performance 
of a theoretical precept. The object of this book 
is to follow — however imperfectly — the same ideal, 
and to present to the reader some of the more im- 
portant and characteristic aspects of England in the 
eighteenth century. These aspects, whether of places 
or of people, we must realize if we would form an 
accurate mental picture of the scene, and obtain its 
proper value from the mass of data which have from 
time to time been made available to those interested 
in this epoch. 

Anatole France somewhere says that poets tell us 
what we vaguely think. Possibly in the chapters 
which follow some may find mental pictures and 

vii 



viii PREFATORY NOTE 

conclusions of which they have thought, but which 
have not hitherto grown into definite forms, or found 
articulate expression. 

To attain the object in view it was necessary that 
the treatment of the subject should be at once broad 
and simple ; to enter minutely into details, to offer 
illustrations of every statement of fact or of opinion, 
would lessen clearness of outline. It would have 
been equally inappropriate to load the following 
pages with references, since a view presented in a 
few lines is frequently the result of the consideration 
of many facts, and of numerous authorities. Some 
references have, however, been inserted, chiefly to 
enable a reader who desires to follow a particular 
subject at length, to have at hand some guide when 
he begins his quest. 

My debt of gratitude to Mr. Thomas Seccombe 
is acknowledged on another page ; to Miss Helen 
Clergue also I am very grateful for valuable aid. 



CONTENTS 

PART I 
Introductory Outlook 

CHAPTER 

I. The Capital 

II. The People of the Capital 

III. Some Resorts and Ceremonies of the 
Capital ..... 

IV. The Women of the Capital 

V. The City of Pleasure 

VI . The Literary Circle of the City of 
Pleasure .... 

VII. The Seaport . • . . 



PAGE 
I 

3 
H 

34 
SO 
59 

89 
107 



PARI II 

Conspicuous Groups . , .125 

VIII. The Nobility . . . , .127 

IX. The Middle Class • • . '147 



IX 



X CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

X. The Intellectual and Moral De- 
velopment OF THE Middle Class . 164 

XL The Men of the Industrial Revolu- 
tion . . . . . .182 

XII. General Influence of the Men of 

THE Industrial Revolution . .196 

XIII, The New Provincial Citizen . . 212 

XIV. The Woman of Letters . . . 224 
XV. The Naval Officer .... 243 

XVL The Country Clergy . . . 259 

XVII. The Peasant 270 

Index . . . . . . 285 



LIST OF , ILLUSTRATIONS 

Buckingham Palace in 1790 . . . Frontispiece 

FACING PAGB 

Vauxhall Gardens . . . . . .12 

The Card Party, about 1780 . . . . 18 

The Cock Pit ....... 26 

A Tea Garden (Bagnigge Wells) . . . .34- 

Bath . . . . . . . . .62 

Richard Nash, Esq. . . . . . ,76 

Henry Fielding , . 90 

Alexander Pope . . . . . , .92 

Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi) . . . . . . 100 

Liverpool . . ..... . 108 

"The Flowing Bowl" or "Sailor's Returned" 118' 
Thomas Pelham, First Duke of Newcastle . .128 
William Henry Cavendish, Third Duke of Port- 
land . . . . . . . . 134 

Augustus Henry, Third Duke of Grafton . . 136 
WoBURN Abbey . . . . . . . 146 

John Wesley 178 

xi 



xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PACK 

JosiAH Wedgwood ...... 190 

Anna Seward 228 

Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay) . . . 234 

Mrs. Montagu ....... 242 

The Press Gang ....... 252'' 

The Sleeping Congregation ..... 268 

The Village Ale-House ..... 276 



THE 

ENGLISH SCENE IN THE 
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

PART I 

INTRODUCTORY OUTLOOK 

As we survey the face of England in the eighteenth 
century our attention is instantly arrested by three 
cities, widely separated, and conspicuous above all 
other urban communities of the land, each having de- 
finite and different characteristics which are intimately 
involved with the peculiar life of the epoch. Of these 
cities the first is the Capital, with its long-existing 
historic traditions, its close association with every 
change in the political growth of the nation, the centre 
of the intellectual life of the people. It is visible, set 
in this particular period, as a capital. It comes 
into view from afar and it passes into the future, 
as a capital, in each phase of its history evidencing 
the influences of the age. 

In the South- West of England, appropriately placed 
in a pleasant land and in a soft atmosphere, are the 
dignified and handsome buildings amidst which we 
I 



2 INTRODUCTORY OUTLOOK 

discern a varied throng enjoying the City of Pleasure, 
a special product of the time ; one which disappears 
with the century. 

Separated alike from London and from Bath by 
some hundreds of miles, wherein are county and 
cathedral towns — not differing markedly from the 
same towns to-day — and stretches of farm-land and 
villages, we note, on a northern estuary within sight 
of the western seas, isolated and self-contained, the 
abode of shipowners and of seamen — the Seaport. 

We have passed two towns not appreciably smaller 
than Liverpool, though in fact less in popula- 
tion, Birmingham and Manchester,^ the one the 
centre of the Midland hardware, the other of the 
Lancashire weaving trade. But though each had a 
technical and commercial individuality, neither had 
the distinct and epoch-marking character of the three 
cities which may be distinguished by illustrative 
appellations. Collectively, Birmingham, Manchester, 
and other urban communities, especially of the 
Midlands and of the North, were much alike ; they 
furnish examples of classes of men of supreme impor- 
tance in the history of the age, though these are not 
connected with any one particular town. They must 
be described when we come to view some sections 
of the people in relation to the century, without 
reference to special localities. 

It is with the Capital that we are in the first place 
concerned. 

1 In 178 1 Liverpool was estimated to have 39,000 inhabitants, 
Manchester (without Salford) in 1773, 22,000, and Birmingham in 
1770, 30,000. 



CHAPTER I 

The Capital 

London to-day is a huge aggregation of considerable 
towns ; in the eighteenth century it was one great 
and homogeneous city, the largest in Europe, with 
a population estimated at 725,903 souls.-^ Small 
though it was compared with the enormous London 
of our own age, striking differences are to be noted 
between its people and those of the provincial towns, 
as of the rural districts, and its society was marked 
by some special features. In fact, an appreciation of 
London as a whole ; not only objectively — of its streets, 
its houses, its business, and its amusements — but of 
the moral and mental characteristics of the men and 
women who formed its society, in a word, of the 
Londoner, implies an understanding of the most con- 
spicuous part of England in the eighteenth century. 
To know London is to know the Capital of the Empire, 
with all that is implied by the expression — the in- 
numerable, varied, and vital, interests. Outside of the 
metropolis, and distinct from it, was the rest of the 
kingdom with its own life and characteristics. Volumes 
have been written on that part of London, commonly 

1 Maitland, "History of London" (1772), vol. ii. p. 744. 

3 



4 LONDON EARLY IN THE CENTURY 

called the West End, which has been pictured for us 
in multitudinous memoirs so that we cannot dissociate 
the England of the Georges from St. James's Street. 
Yet this locality was only the centre of a portion, 
though, relatively to its numbers, a most influential 
one, of the society of the kingdom. 

In the first half of the eighteenth century the 
country lay quiescent after prolonged political and 
religious conflicts ; years of internal turmoil were 
followed by years of peace. England was politically 
fatigued. Still conscious of the shocks which she had 
endured at the Revolution and the Rebellion, and of 
the constant anxiety of the age of Anne, she was 
grateful for rest at home, and thankful for the Hano- 
verian dynasty, which had become a symbol of popular 
freedom. This dominant note was most marked in 
London, which, as the heart of the kingdom, was 
most sensitive to the feeling of relief and, as a capital, 
was most capable of appreciating material prosperity. 
But the national energy, the dynamic force of the 
nation, had not lessened, the temperament and the 
fibre of the people had not changed, and beneath the 
quietude of the eighteenth century were the old and 
often tried inherent vigour and common sense. We 
must seek for evidences, however, of these qualities 
not so much in London as in provincial centres, in 
Lancashire, in Yorkshire, in Derbyshire, where the 
genius of the inventor and the enterprise of the 
manufacturer were changing the face of the country 
and the habits of its people, were founding a new 



THE CAPITAL S 

class, and causing social, and eventually political, 
changes throughout England. 

The striking difference between the size of the 
Metropolis in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries 
increases the difficulty of realizing to-day the life 
of the Londoner in the former age. We are so accus- 
tomed to London as we see it, throbbing with palpable 
energy, and, as we daily move about in it, scarcely 
aware of its vitality and its immensity, only conscious 
in a vague way of its vast size and of the infinite 
occupations of its people, that it is not easy to com- 
prehend it as it appeared to our forefathers. London 
at the period of our survey was in a state of change ; 
it was, as it is to-day, growing ; it was in course of 
transformation from a collection of separate but 
neighbouring communities into a single city. But it 
was a change rather in the nature of consolidation 
than of expansion. In the twentieth century London, 
a vast metropolis, irresistibly expands, overspreading 
rural districts, and absorbing large villages. In the 
eighteenth century this distinction between the 
capital and the communities around it was less con- 
spicuous, and places around London and Westminster 
— Stepney and Kensington for instance — gradually 
joined with, rather than were absorbed by, the main 
town. The cities of London and Westminster were, 
however, united, and some of the villages which had 
existed around them were just becoming parts of the 
town. 

If a stranger had hired a phaeton and started from 



6 TYBURN 

Tyburn turnpike to take a survey of the scene, and 
had happened to choose a Monday morning before 
1783 — after that date executions took place in 
front of Newgate — he would probably have found 
himself entangled in a disreputable crowd, the nearest 
approach to which nowadays would be the throng at 
the entrance to a racecourse. Opposite the spot on 
which the Marble Arch now stands he would have 
noticed one or more gallows, and carts containing 
the condemned persons with arms pinioned and a 
rope round their necks and coffins by them, men and 
women, murderers or simple thieves, received by jeers 
and cheers, by murmurs and shouts, from the excited 
and expectant populace. As each vehicle placed 
beneath the gallows moved away, a dangling body 
would have been seen against the sky. This would be 
seized by those who had been the friends of the exe- 
cuted man, who holding it, by their weight sought 
to end his sufferings. If the stranger had waited 
longer he would have noticed women in black, the 
womenfolk of the dead, claiming the corpses of 
their relatives, or a surgeon eager for experiments 
carrying off the body of a friendless felon. Anxious 
to escape from this frequent, and to us shocking, spec- 
tacle, the result at once of a cruel criminal law and a 
brutal population, our friend would have driven along 
Tyburn Road and Oxford Street. On his left were a 
few streets, of which, on first starting, Berkeley Street 
was the northern boundary; beyond Marylebone 
Street and Queen Anne Square w^rq the Marylebone 



THE CAPITAL 7 

Gardens, and then a long succession of open fields 
extended to the north. He would presently pass along 
Great Russell Street noting Montague House, and 
there, after 1753,^ he could have, if so inclined, tarried 
for a time and inspected the Harleian manuscripts. 
A few yards farther was Bedford or Southampton 
House, a white building, long and low, with a court- 
yard, behind it were delightful and shady gardens 
from which were charming views of the green heights 
of Highgate across Lamb's Conduit Fields. These 
noble mansions, and others not inferior to them in 
various parts of eighteenth-century London, were not 
merely architectural features of the capital, however 
noticeable. They emphasised the supreme political 
and social position of the aristocracy, not, as to-day, 
lost among the miscellaneous crowds of men and 
dwellings in the West End, but dominant over, and 
apart from, the general population of the town. 

Continuing along Great Ormond Street the way- 
farer would soon approach the Foundling Hospital 
which kindly Captain Thomas Coram had established 
in 1 741, and which had not a house near it. Thence, 
keeping to the outskirts of the town, he would 
reach the southern end of Finsbury Fields, near 
the junction of the City Road and Old Street. 
He would, if it were summer, pass numbers 
of wayfarers driving or walking to Bagnigge or 
Sadler's Wells, some hoping by drinking the waters 

^ Montague House was purchased as a British Museum in 1753, 
primarily to hold the Qottonjan and Harleian M3Sj 



8 EASTERN DISTRICTS OF THE CAPITAL 

to improve their health, others going thither only 
for enjoyment. As he turned southward, on his left 
hand the houses of Hoxton village might be seen among 
the trees, w^hile beyond the open space of Upper 
Moorfields, which was laid out with walks, a collection 
of unimportant streets and houses extended eastwards 
to a line of which the centre was High Street, White- 
chapel. Beyond was a succession of green fields with 
a few houses grouped round Bethnal Green. 

The explorer would then come down Finsbury, 
past Bethlehem Hospital to the Royal Exchange. If 
minded to drive to the eastern termination of Lon- 
don, he had little more than a mile to traverse ; for 
when he reached the end of Whitechapel Street by 
the London Hospital, before him would have stretched 
the high road running through the villages of Mile 
End, New Town, and Old Town. To the southward 
lay the quiet village of Stepney, whither the East 
End Londoner resorted on Sundays and holidays to eat 
Stepney buns and drink ale and cider. Here also the 
seaman ashore regaled himself and his mistresses with 
like refreshments. By the London Hospital he would, 
turning to the right, drive along the New Road through 
open country. About Ratcliff Highway he would meet 
with a few houses among orchards and market gardens, 
till he reached Wapping, with its two or three 
streets running parallel with the river, crowded with 
sailors, fishwives, and disreputable women. This 
maritime piece of London extended from Sha dwell 
Causeway to a littk east pf the Tow^rj showing fron^ 



THE CAPITAL 



9 



a distance all the picturesque features which belong 
to a busy waterside district. In midstream were 
many ships — colliers, Dutch galliots, hay boats, and 
West Indiamen, discharging their varied cargoes into 
barges, an animated and suggestive sight. But on 
shore the foul streets were thronged with drunken 
seamen and scarcely less drunken women, their un- 
kempt hair hanging over their faces, their bosoms bare, 
or half hidden by a handkerchief, and on their feet 
long quartered shoes with great buckles, their heedless 
and immoral lives eventually to end in the great church- 
yard of St. George, Ratcliff. Each tavern was filled 
with swearing sailors, some just paid off, a crimp or 
two and their half-stupid prey, and the streets were 
muddy and filthy. 

Tired, however, of sitting in his carriage, our friend 
would take boat from Wapping Old Stairs (Thames 
Tunnel) to Tooley Stairs at the south end of London 
Bridge. He would pass Horsely Down with its houses, 
its stairs, and its dock, meeting, it might be, the Lord 
Mayor in his state barge, doffing his hat to an acquain- 
tance who is on his way down stream, perhaps to 
Dr. Johnson and Boswell bound on a pleasure trip 
from Temple Stairs to Greenwich, arguing, as they 
glide along, on the argonauts and on preaching.^ He 
would watch for a moment to see if fishermen from 
Lambeth had had any luck and had caught a salmon. 

The immensity of the modern metropolis has 
caused its people to forget that in the eighteenth 
^ Bogwell's " Life of Johnson," chap. vii. (July 30, 1763). 



10 THE THAMES 

century London was essentially a riverside town, with 
all the changing picturesqueness of a tidal shore. 
To-day the inhabited area has grown to a size out of 
all proportion to the Thames, but throughout the 
eighteenth century the river was a conspicuous 
feature of the town, an important element in the life 
of the Londoner alike for business and pleasure, 
constantly in his view, at once an anchorage, a highway, 
and a pleasure resort. The comparatively small 
tonnage of ships in those days enabled them to be 
moored quite up to London Bridge with perfect ease, 
and from Shadwell upwards the surface of the river 
was thronged with small boats calling at one or other 
of the numerous " stairs " on either shore, and passing 
from bank to bank. 

" On either hand, 
Like a long wintry forest, groves of masts 
Shot up their spires ; the bellying sheet between 
Possessed the breezy void ; the sooty hulk 
Steer'd sluggish on ; the splendid barge along 
Row'd, regular, to harmony; around, 
The boat, light skimming, stretch'd its oary wings." ^ 

Though regattas were unknown, pleasure boats glided 
about the river by Vauxhall, Twickenham, and 
Richmond, and well-to-do people liked on summer 
afternoons to visit their friends by water, passing from 
villa to villa, or were rowed about in gay parties, thus 
obtaining opportunities for the enjoyment of the 

1 Thompson, " The §easons^" Autumn (1730). 



THE CAPITAL ii 

tranquil open-air pleasures which our ancestors valued 
in their quiet, sensible fashion. 

But we must return to our wayfarer. Arrived at 
his destination on the southern shore, he would drive 
through the Borough to the beginning of Blackman 
Street, where he would find himself in the country, here 
low-lying and unhealthy. He would return through 
a suburban district to Blackfriars Bridge, and thence 
proceed over familiar ground, Fleet Street and the 
Strand, where quaint signs hung from the shops and 
taverns — to Charing Cross. To the east of St. James's 
Park with its canal, he would see Westminster Abbey 
and the Houses of Parliament as they existed till 
destroyed by fire in 1834. He has come to the group 
of buildings which connect London with England 
politically, legally, and ecclesiastically, which more 
especially emphasize its character as the national 
capital, and which are the most remarkable links 
between the century on which our gaze is fixed and a 
distant past, and an unseen future. The road from 
the Horse Ferry was the boundary of Westminster, 
and beyond it were the orchards and market gardens 
which in those days supplied London with vegetables 
and fruit. Then driving up Pall Mall and St. James's 
Street, the end, too, of that part of London on the 
W^st — for there were only a few houses, as now, be- 
tween it and the Green Park — he would have continued 
along Tyburn Lane (Park Lane), noting, as he passed, 
the house of the Earls of Dorset — which has been 
replaced by a magnificent modern ijiansipn — till h^ 



12 VAUXHALL GARDENS 

found himself, after having covered a space of some 
thirteen miles, again at Tyburn turnpike, now quite 
deserted by the crowds of the morning. 

If the visitor — whose imaginary expedition through 
London we have followed — had chanced to conclude 
his journey towards evening, he would hardly have 
failed to hire a boat at Westminster and to visit 
Vauxhall Gardens or, as they were called up to 1786, 
the New Spring Garden at Vauxhall,^ the most famous 
of the out-of-door pleasure resorts of the eighteenth 
century. Opened soon after the Restoration — pro- 
bably in 1 66 1 — they remained a popular rendezvous 
until 1859. In the eighteenth century they were in 
their zenith, though long before this time they 
were most attractive to the pleasure-seeker : " Lord I " 
exclaimed Pepys, when, busy with his official work, 
he met two handsome women calling on his wife, 
" to see how my nature could not refrain from 
the temptation, but I must invite them to go to 
Foxhall to Spring Gardens ! " This was in 1666, and 
thenceforward all through the succeeding century 
visitors, from the Prince of Wales to the City ap- 
prentice — the entrance fee was only a shilling — 
from May to September crowded the boxes, the leafy 
alleys, and the tree-shaded walks. Vauxhall was a 
mixture of a West End Exhibition of to-day and the 
Kurhaus Gardens of a German spa. We can scarcely 
doubt that although an inherent love in English 

1 Warwick Wroth, " The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth 
Century," p. 286, 



THE CAPITAL 13 

people of fresh air and trees and flowers was one 
cause of the attraction of Vauxhall as of other out- 
of-door resorts, that another was the influence 
throughout the years following the Restoration, the 
Revolution, and the accession of the Elector, of 
foreign habits and customs among the more fashionable 
sections of society. The exiled Cavaliers had learnt in 
France to appreciate a flein air life, the ideal of which 
we see depicted by Pater and Lancret, while the 
Dutch soldiers and courtiers set a fashion in England 
which they had brought with them from Holland. 



CHAPTER II 

The People of the Capital 

The Londoner of the eighteenth century was a 
stay-at-home person. The difficulty and the expense 
of travelling made it usually impossible for him to pass 
beyond the villages by which the capital was sur- 
rounded — Knightsbridge, Hampstead, Kensington, 
and Hoxton. A long journey was not often under- 
taken unless it were absolutely necessary. " A rich 
citizen of London has perhaps some very valuable 
relatives or friends in the West ; he thinks no more 
of visiting them than of travelling the deserts of 
Nubia, which might as well be in the moon, or in 
Limbo Patrum, considering them as a sort of separate 
being." ^ Only a few vigorous and specially energetic 
people made tours for pleasure in England till quite 
the end of the century. Riding-horses, stage coaches, 
wagons, and post-chaises, it is true, thronged the 
roads on every side of London. From the George 
and Blue Boar in Holborn, eighty-four coaches de- 
parted every day. Coaches left for Oxford four days 
in the week, and for Bristol twice a week. A 
journey to York occupied thirty hours, and cost 

^ Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xxii. p. 553. 
14 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 15 

£3 6s. 3^. These are but a few examples of the traffic 
by road from London which enlivened the main 
EngHsh highways, and the courtyards of the old inns 
of London and of country towns and villages. 

We often think of this form of travelling as pleasant 
and picturesque, and as an agreeable characteristic 
of eighteenth-century life, but if w^ regard it a little 
more closely we shall realize that it had also an effect 
on the life and character of the Londoner. It was 
neither an easy nor a rapid method of travel and, 
through the difficulty of communication as well as 
the position of the metropolis in a corner of England, 
the majority of Londoners were isolated from the 
rest of England, and were divided somewhat from their 
countrymen. London in the eighteenth century was 
in many respects the opposite of what it is to-day. 
Now it needs more corporate life, less cosmo- 
politanism, greater municipal individuality ; then it 
was homogeneous, well defined, and proud of its 
importance as the chief city of Great Britain, yet 
unembarrassed by a size to which no city had 
hitherto reached. The Londoner of the eighteenth 
century, while he cannot be called provincial — for 
the infiuence of a widely extended trade, and the 
effect of the connexion of Great Britain with European 
politics of which he was constantly hearing, tended 
to enlarge his mental view — ^was yet essentially a 
townsman, and often ignorant of the life of his fellow- 
countrymen at a distance, whether they lived in 
town or country. 



i6 SOCIETY OF THE WEST END 

The most conspicuous and interesting of the 
dwellers in the metropolis were a number — and a 
comparatively small number — -of men and women 
who were clustered together in the West End, and 
who formed the governing class. Politics, and 
pleasure in various, but rather limited, forms — cards, 
routs, dinners, and balls — were the occupation of 
this striking division of English society, the chronicles 
of which are inscribed in the immortal letters of 
Horace Walpole and in the gossiping correspondence 
of George Selwyn and his friends. The nobility, 
as will be more fully described in a later chapter, 
were so essential to the government of the country, 
that from this cause, and from their high and in- 
fluential social position, they formed the core of this 
fashionable section, and gave it an aristocratic colour, 
and something of the tone of an exclusive club. 
The relations of all those who belonged to it were 
personal, often intimate. Lively Lady Sarah 
Lennox, for instance, writes about her political 
friends as naturally as of the women of her family. 
The same feature is constantly apparent in Walpole's 
correspondence. In a letter to Mason, in 1778, he 
first tells a story of his new housemaid and of her 
late mistress, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, 
then he passes to a lawsuit as to Lord Foley's will, 
concluding by an historical dissertation on the war 
with the American Colonies and a half-humorous 
and half-despairing summary of the political situation 
— " unless sudden inspiration should seize the whole 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 17 

island, and make it with one voice invite Dr. Franklin 
to come over and new model the Government, it will 
crumble away in the hands that still hold it. They 
feel, they own, their insufficiency. Everybody is 
sensible of it, and everybody seems to think, like Lady 
Melbourne, that if we are blown up, it will be very 
comical." ^ 

The people who comprised this important division 
were distinct from the rest of the inhabitants of the 
capital, who, whether merchants in the City, or lawyers 
and doctors outside of it, were regarded with some- 
thing like contempt by this particular society, a 
contempt which was exaggerated by their women folk, 
who threw up their heads and made rude remarks 
about ladies who were not of the ton. Selfish but 
good-natured, sensible and worldly, this section did 
not trouble itself about the past, or disturb itself 
about the future ; marriages :^nd deaths, the last 
debate, the next appointment, or a recent scandal 
alike interested it, it lived in and for the present. 
Politics and pleasure were daily and closely inter- 
mingled — " the blue and buff junto meet in St. 
James's Street to fix upon their plan of operations for 
to-morrow," ^ wrote Storer, a man about town, to 
Lord Carlisle, a month after the news of the disaster 
of York Town reached London in the autumn of 1781. 
This is a simple sentence, it is, however, singularly 
suggestive. We see the Whig leaders meeting in 

1 " Letters of Walpole " (edited by Toynbee), vol. x. p. 239. 

2 " George Selwyn, His Letters and His Life," p, 165. 

2 



i8 POLITICS AND SOCIETY 

Charles Fox's rooms in St. James's Street, where some 
of the company have been engrossed in faro or hazard, 
whilst others have come from a chat at Brooks's 
or White's. In fact, gambling and politics were 
largely conducted in one street in the West End of 
the town, and political campaigns were planned where 
men lost their thousands on the green table. In 
many respects, too, this section of society was 
more closely in touch with the country than with 
the City at the very time when it formed a striking 
element in London life. This difference between 
the City and the West End makes more apparent the 
diminishing political power of the former, the in- 
fluence of which was now becoming more purely 
commercial. The conjunction in the West End of 
statesmen, noblemen, men of letters, and men of 
pleasure, great ladies, and giddy women of fashion, 
commenced in the reign of Anne ; its end began 
when Lord Grey passed the Reform Bill of 1832, when 
the exclusiveness of the governing and fashionable 
section was broken by the invasion of the middle-class 
politician, and of the City magnate, whose advent on 
the political scene had been emphasized by the coming 
of the wealthy Nabob in the middle of the eighteenth 
century. 

Another section, different from the great body of 
average Londoners, comprised a number of middle- 
class men and women, some well-to-do and even rich, 
generally unostentatious, appreciative of comfort, 
but more appreciative still of brightness of mind 




The Card Party, 

About jySo 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 19 

and clever conversation, resulting in agreeable and 
delightful intercourse. This group has been por- 
trayed for us by Fanny Burney in her Diary, and 
she has handed down a memorable gallery, Johnson, 
Burke, Mrs. Thrale, and Mrs. Montague, Mr. Crisp, 
and Mr. Thrale, the Lockes of Norbury Park, and 
her own family in which the active, intelligent, 
and cosmopolitan Dr. Burney is a striking and an 
attractive figure. 

Literature was the bond of union among them, while 
in the gatherings at young Slaughter's Coffee House 
in St. Martin's Lane, science was predominant. 
" Bentley belonged to a club which met every Wednes- 
day at young Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's 
Lane. It bore no distinctive title, though frequented 
by men of real science and distinguished merit. 
John Hunter, the great anatomist, was at one time 
its chairman. Sir Joseph Banks, Solander, Sir C. 
Blagden, Dr. George Fordyce, Milne, Maskelyne, 
Captain Cook, Sir G. Shuckburgh, Lord Mulgrave, 
Smeaton, Ramsden, Griffith the publisher, and many 
others were or had been members. Edgeworth and 
Wedgwood generally attended its meetings as guests 
when in town. Researches and discoveries were 
discussed, and lengthened arguments, differences, and 
agreements were always crowned by a supper, which 
after January 3, 1775, was eaten off a special service 
of cream ware, supplied by Wedgwood, and probably 
a gift." ^ But the fashionable and governing class 
^ " Meteyard, Life of Wedgwood," vol. ii. p. 418. 



20 CHARACTER OF THE LONDONER 

cared or knew little about these groups, and did not 
perceive how important they were as factors in the 
evolution of the English people. 

The ordinary Londoner of the eighteenth century 
was the type of the Englishman as he appeared to 
foreigners, and as he has remained to this day ; from 
him Arbuthnot drew his sketch of John Bull in his 
famous satire, " Law is a Bottomless Pit." He was 
sensible and unemotional, honest and coarse-minded, 
clear-headed and persevering ; in his religion and his 
politics he was practical and independent — " un 
Anglais, comme homme libre, va au ciel par le chemin 
qui lui plait," wrote Voltaire in his " Lettres Philo- 
sophiques." He had no ambitions, and his creed was 
summed up in the phrase that he tried to do his duty 
in the station in which he had been placed. Piety, 
prudence, courage, and honesty were, we read on the 
quaint monument in St. Helen's, Bishopsgate Street, 
to Martin Bond citizen and soldier, and captain of 
the trained bands of the City in 1588, the marked 
qualities of the typical citizen. They were those 
which predominated among the merchants of London 
in the eighteenth century, who were the backbone of 
the population. Their piety was unquestionably 
superficial from the point of view of subjective religion, 
but the practical fruits of it are visible in the numerous 
benefactions of which the walls of the City churches 
bear record, and the muniments of the City Companies 
give abundant evidence.^ 

^ The records of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, for instance, shovi 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 21 

The characteristics of the Londoner are reflected 
in the philosophical and the religious works of his 
age, from which, rather than from individuals, Vol- 
taire and Rousseau have drawn their pictures of the 
Englishman. For two centuries and a half England, 
and London its capital, had passed through momentous 
constitutional changes, had influenced the course of 
continental affairs, and had had commercial relations 
with most parts of the globe. The London merchant, 
homely and unassuming, had nevertheless a fixed and 
undemonstrative pride and a confidence in himself and 
in his city which arose from considerable achieve- 
ments and from a state of individual freedom. 

But the tradesman — well-to-do as he might be— 
was narrow-minded and vulgar. He tried to imitate 
those of a higher position, and to be seen at the 
same places of amusement. Lord Orville and the 
Braughtons are types, depicted by Fanny Burney, of 
the cultivated nobleman, and of tradespeople from 
Snow Hill; each went to Vauxhall, and each could 
go to the Opera, just as all classes could go to an 
execution or to a theatre. But imitation could 
give the shopkeeper the superficial polish of the noble- 
man, or the breadth of view and the experience of 
life of the merchant. 

Young men came up to London in the eighteenth 

sixteen benefactors to the parish in the eighteenth century. On the 
north wall is a tablet telling how Francis Bancroft (1727) gave all 
his property in London and Middlesex to the Drapers' Company for 
the purposes of charity and education. These instances might be 
multiplied. 



22 THE CITY 

century as they had for generations, but in numbers so 
small as to make little impression on the general body 
of town-born citizens, for the country gentleman, 
whether nobleman or squire, had almost ceased to 
send his younger sons to seek their fortunes in the 
City. " It is without possibility of dispute that the 
City was no longer recruited from the class called 
gentry ; that the number of ' gentlemen,' using the 
old sense of the word, who held office in the City, was 
extremely small ; that, for causes which can be ex- 
plained, it was not only possible, but common, for 
quite poor lads to succeed in business and to amass 
great fortunes." But poor lads had always been able 
to come to the front in the City of London, and in 
this passage we are not told why the son of the mer- 
chant, or, as often as not, of the small shopkeeper, was 
taking a larger share in the commerce of London, and 
strengthening a class which has had special character- 
istics down to our own day. The true causes were the 
increasing size of the standing army, the popularity, 
in spite of its hardships, of the navy, and the numerous 
opportunities given to the younger sons of the nobility 
and gentry to realize their ambitions in military or 
naval service. The victories of Marlborough gave 
immense popularity and eclat to military life, and 
from the death of William III. to the day of Waterloo, 
there was, year after year, constant employment for 
the young Englishman in the army or the navy, 
employment which in a day might make his name 
famous from Edinburgh to London. And so he was 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 23 

withdrawn from commerce, the commerce which 
had been patronized by Prince Rupert, who had been 
one of the founders of the Hudson's Bay Company, 
and also by statesmen. Robert Harley was a 
director of the South Sea Company, the shares of 
which had been squabbled over in the royal ante- 
rooms at Kensington Palace. Consequently the 
Londoner who made his livelihood in the City was 
born, educated, lived, and died within the sound of 
Bow Bells. 

The infant who was born into the world in the 
eighteenth century was — if life were worth living — 
fortunate if he survived to boyhood. Maitland put 
the mortality of children five years of age or under at 
forty-seven per cent. Besant, taking the registers of 
St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, for his data, but for a few 
years only, states that the proportion in that parish 
was fifty-nine per cent.^ These figures may not be 
altogether accurate, but they show sufficiently clearly 
the dangers which surrounded child-life from the 
accumulated effects of " bad air, bad drainage, and 
bad food," and, we may very well add, unskilful 
medical advice and complete ignorance of methods of 
nursing. The good old times in London were, indeed, 
fatal to human life, as can well be realized by a com- 
parison of the figures of the Institute of Actuaries. 
According to the tables of this body to-day, out of 
100,000 who are born, 38,124 are alive at the age of 
seventy. According to Maitland's figures in the 
^ Besant, " London in the Eighteenth Century," p. 382. 



24 EDUCATION OF THE LONDONER 

eighteenth century, there were but 13,000, and 
according to the register of St. Botolph 14,571. 

If the chances either of attaining to boyhood or of 
living to old age were against the Londoner, the 
possibilities of obtaining a good education were not 
much greater. A boy of well-to-do parents had open 
to him one of the public schools — St. Paul's, Charter- 
house, Christ's Hospital, Merchant Taylors', the City 
of London, or, outside London proper, Westminster. 
But if a parent could not send his son to one of these 
great foundations, his children might perhaps be taught 
at a charity school attached to a parish. Outside these 
schools ^ elementary, horn-book or dame schools were 
to be found in different parts of London, and for 
higher education private schools, from the academies 
carried on by broken-down craftsmen to the more 
pretentious establishment belonging to some clergy- 
man who had taken a degree at a university. If, 
however, a boy had learned to read, to write a good 
hand, and understand arithmetic, he had done well, 
for " the middle-class education was principally 
carried on in ' academies ' kept by men, broken-down, 
bankrupt, or turned out of some other employment. 
The master could teach nothing more than writing 

1 According to Maitland (vol. ii. p. 277), there were (1772) 37 
free schools — which included the great foundations of St. PauPs 
and Westminster — containing 3,173 scholars. The parish and other 
schools sustained by voluntary contributions were — boys' schools 75, 
girls' 53 ; some of these were both for the education of boys and 
girls, and were not separate. They contained 3,458 boys and 1,901 
girls. 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 25 

and arithmetic ; he could also hear lessons learned 
by rote ; he pretended to teach French, and had a 
Swiss retained on the establishment ; needless to say 
that the boys learned no more French in the eighteenth 
century than they do at present. The usher taught 
Latin to those boys who learned it ; there was also 
a dancing-master on his staff." 

We have noted how high was the mortality, it 
follows that from the moment that a young man 
began his life's work in London, whether it were 
professional, commercial, or manual, he might well 
look forward to a much briefer span of existence than 
the Londoner of to-day, an existence unvaried, simple, 
and rather brutal. The Londoner of the eighteenth 
century was indeed an elemental person. The ob- 
jects of past political contests from century to century 
had been for individual freedom, and most men had at 
this time no abstract views about patriotism or human 
rights ; they wanted only to be allowed to go their 
own way without hindrance from king or parliament, 
bishop or nonconformist preacher. Little disturbed 
by the central administration, by the middle of the 
eighteenth century this freedom had been to a great 
extent obtained. The Londoner could eat, drink, 
work, play, and pray, much as he liked, and his 
likings, as was natural, were somewhat gross — sensitive- 
ness, delicacy, often decency, were qualities which 
he did not possess. 

The characteristics of the people were shown in theii 
amusements. They loved anything in the nature of 



26 OUT-OF-DOORS AMUSEMENTS 

combat, though at this time they seldom joined in it 
themselves ; physical training, asceticism for the pur- 
pose of fitting men to take part in athletic contests, 
systematic participation in games which required 
prolonged exertion, were unknown. The Londoner, 
however, showed in a rudimentary form a liking for 
outdoor pleasures ; but the fact that they were of an 
unorganized and holiday kind has caused this trait 
to be somewhat overlooked. " Many of the citizens," 
says a contemporary writer, " take delight in sailing, 
rowing, swimming, and fishing in the river Thames, 
whilst others in the circumjacent fields, bowling- 
greens, etc., divert themselves with horse and foot 
races, riding, leaping, wrestling, cricket, archery, 
cudgels, coits, bowling, skittles, ninepins, and bull and 
bear baiting." ^ This is a goodly list, and shows that 
large numbers in one way or another partook of physi- 
cal exercise. Though the Thames was thronged 
with boats, they were generally rowed by watermen ; 
towards the end of the century here and there an 
amateur would walk a match for a wager. In the 
winter, if there were sufficient frost, skaters, chiefly 
of the more fashionable class, could be seen on the 
ornamental waters, and driving was the hobby of 
young men who would now have their hunters, their 
racehorses, or their grouse moors. Sir John Lade, 
quite at the end of the century, was a famous 
whip, and instructed the Prince of Wales in the 
way to handle a team ; but driving as a sporting 
1 Maitland, " History of London," (1772), vol. ii. p. 1327. 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 27 

art was not the amusement of the middle-class 
Londoner. 

A common manner in which the love of combat 
could be gratified was by witnessing cock-fighting, 
cockpits indeed were to be found all over London.^ It 
was a national sport, in which men of all degrees 
delighted. There was a particularly famous cockpit 
behind Gray's Inn, another in Drury Lane, which the 
apprentices of London, by way of a quiet amusement 
on Shrove Tuesday, annually wrecked. If any more 
ferocious manner of gratifying this instinct could be 
found, it was not neglected, and animal suffering 
added to the pleasure of the afternoon. Fighting 
with fists, single-sticks, quarter-staffs, or broad-swords 
was common ; and if the combatants were sparing 
of their blood, " blasphemy, cursing, and reviling " 
were heard ; if, however, " they hack and hue one 
another pretty heartily, insomuch that the stage runs 
with their gore, nothing can be more satisfactory to 
the spectators, who are then generally sure to reward 
them very bountifully." ^ 

As men grow older, they desire tranquil pastimes, 
which generally means being only spectators. The 
amusements I have described were suited to youths, 
young men, and men in the prime of life. The 
basis of them was an almost unrestrained and 
fundamental love of ferocious combat ; for all of 

1 Sydney, " England and the English in the Eighteenth Century," 
vol. i. p. 177. 

2 "The Brief and Merry History of Great Britain." 



28 FREEDOM OF THE LONDONER 

these amusements combat was an essential part. 
Oftentimes in the streets among the common 
people " assailants begin with running against each 
other head foremost like rams, and afterwards come to 
boxing." Then a ring is formed and people run out of 
their shops — ^just as to-day they gather round a disabled 
motor. Yet in all this brutality there was a sense of 
fair play and of justice and the rules of the game must 
be observed. The Londoner, in fact, enjoyed without 
affectation the amusements which pleased a nature 
in which we see the fierce qualities of his Northern 
forefathers combined with a sense of justice which had 
become characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race. 

The moment that one perceives these particular 
qualities combined with ample individual freedom, so 
that full play could be given to them, the basis of 
the social state of London in the eighteenth century 
becomes clear. Filthy streets, noisome prisons and 
mad-houses, unconcealed vice, were the results of 
this combination of character and circumstance. To 
a high-minded despot much that was then common 
in London would have been intolerable, and would 
unquestionably have been swept away with a high 
hand ; but the Londoner had attained to a state of 
individual freedom without having yet learnt to seek 
for methods by which society or his city should be 
made cleaner and purer. 

From necessity, rather than from choice, the Lon- 
doner took the air in a leisurely and unexciting fashion, 
but in his own way he had more open-air pleasures 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 29 

than those who have come after him, for London and 
its outskirts were bright with gardens. In the evening 
at Ranelagh and Vauxhall he could see men such as 
Fanny Burney has depicted in Lord Orville and Sir 
Clement Willoughby, as well as his own friends from 
Holborn and Cheapside. With these resorts must be 
grouped Marylebone Gardens, and Cupers Gardens 
on the Surrey side of the Thames. These four were 
the resorts of rank and fashion as well as of more 
humble folk. The entrance fee was small, and their 
popularity arose very much because they provided 
concerts and spectacles, fetes and dancing ; from 
May to September in fine weather they were extra- 
ordinarily crowded. 

A second group of gardens afforded simpler pleasures 
and less aristocratic company. These were attached 
to the medical wells — Islington Spa, Bagnigge, Pancras 
Wells,^ and many others, to which persons were 
drawn from mixed motives — from a wish to improve 
their health, and to enjoy fresh air and various 
quiet amusements, a ramble in the maze, perhaps 
a game of bowls or of skittles. If the Londoner 
were in a domestic mood he could take his wife and 
children to a tea-garden, and have his tea in an 
arbour, as Morland has depicted him, perhaps to the 
White Conduit House, where cricket of an embryonic 
kind could be played when he chose ; or to the Three 
Hats, in Islington, a favourite Sunday resort, one 

^ Warwick Wroth, " The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eight- 
eenth Century," pp. 15, 56, 123. 



30 PLEASURE GARDENS 

made more lively on weekdays, for a large part of the 
last half of the century, by a band of music and 
equestrian performances. And there was Hornsey if 
he wanted to go quite out of town. In fact he had 
an ample choice of resorts on both sides of the Thames. 
Gambling was not unknown at some of these places, 
and disreputable women occasionally found admittance, 
but generally in the pleasure gardens of the eighteenth 
century the Londoner was at his best ; husbands, wives, 
and children, young men and maidens, friends arm-in- 
arm, there enjoyed life in a simple and natural manner 
without excitement, satisfied with the good that 
providence had provided. Sometimes the brutality 
of the age showed itself even at the tea-gardens, 
especially in the cruel and childish amusem^ent which 
was known as duck-hunting. 

To the citizen the pleasure gardens of London were 
of great importance. Difficulties and expense of travel 
prevented movement from place to place, and so for 
him they were at once seaside and Alps, trout stream 
and golf links ; they represented almost entirely in this 
age the out-of-door existence of men of every calling 
— the merchant, the lawyer, the small tradesman. 

Wherever the Londoner went he went staidly, 
in a stiff dress. The result of his inertia was an 
absence of a knowledge of rural life and of landscape ; 
it made the ordinary aspects of the country unfamiliar 
and even extraordinary, and it is from this fact that 
we find the almost ludicrous descriptions in diaries 
and correspondence of natural features which to-day 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 31 

the Londoner would scarcely notice. Dr. Johnson, 
who was a^J^piS-SLI^Qi^dcuier^ regarded the Hawkstone 
Hills in Shropshire much as a city clerk might to-day 
looF'upon'The High Alps. Under the circumstances 
orthe age Johnson's tour to the Hebrides was certainly 
lemarkaBTe, a quite astonishing feat of travel for a 
Londoner;' who was most at home in Fleet Street. 

Yet the Englishman has ever had a love of the 
country, the result of village life, of the character 
of his land,-— its quiet beauty, and its homely aspect. 
Rural life is praised alike by Herrick and Cowper; 
but' in the literature of the eighteenth century 
love of form concealed a genuine liking for nature. 
London, small as it was compared with the London 
of to-day, had already developed into a great city, 
with the features of a capital, and its inhabitant was 
essentially a townsman. But a growing appreciation 
of the country among townsmen is perceptible not 
only in the Londoner's liking for his tea-gardens, 
many of which appealed to him by their rural charm, 
but in the pleasure found by some of the nobility and 
upper middle-class in suburban and Thames-side villas, 
showing that under all the formalism and artificiality 
of the eighteenth century there existed a love of fields 
and flowers and of the changing delights of nature. 

It was towards the end of the century that the man 
of business began to live in the West End, sometimes to 
own a cottage in the rural districts close to the metropolis 
in what are now parts of the town or its suburbs. The 
town-houses of the Londoner began also to surround 



32 GROWTH OF THE WEST END 

the mansions of noblemen — Powis House in Great 
Ormond Street, Burlington House, Leicester House, 
Dorchester House, which had hitherto been almost 
country-houses, bearing some resemblance to places 
such as Osterley Park is to-day, and Holland House 
was to the men of the 'thirties. This change had 
many results ; among others it lessened the attendance 
at the City churches, which I notice here because this 
falling- off in the size of the congregations has been 
mistaken for an indication of a less religious spirit in 
London. It tended also to destroy the homogeneity 
of the City, except as a business centre, and to mini- 
mize the differences which existed between the 
citizens proper and those who came from the west 
side of Temple Bar. The City man, whether in 
a large or a small business, unless he were a member 
of Parliament, or held some exceptional position, was 
regarded as an intruder outside his own haunts. 
To this exclusiveness the movement westwards helped 
to put an end. 

The possession of a villa, whether it was Mr. 
Thrale's, near the quiet village of Streatham, or Sir 
Joshua's at Richmond, or Garrick's at Hampton, 
showed a love of quiet, and of country life not 
too distant from the centre of national affairs. Lord 
Chesterfield owned a villa at Blackheath — to-day the 
last place in the world one would fix on for a rural 
retreat — which he called Babiole, in compliment to 
his French friend Madame de Monconseil, where he 
cultivated melons and pineapples with something 



THE PEOPLE OF THE CAPITAL 33 

atin to enthusiasm.^ These houses were not merely 
suburban dwellings ; they occupied the place of the 
country-houses of to-day, which are quickly reached 
from London, are convenient for week-end visits, and 
for long stays in late summer and autumn. The 
gardens by which they were surrounded were, it is 
true, often disfigured by artificial ornaments of a 
pseudo-classical style, faint imitations of the extra- 
ordinary collection of temples, alcoves, and statuary 
which were dotted over the immense pleasure- 
grounds of Stowe. Still, appreciation of nature, 
which has always appealed to the English man and 
woman, was the basis of the taste for these pleasure- 
houses and grounds, which were especially attractive 
when they were situated on the banks of the Thames. 
1 Ernst, " Life of Lord Chesterfield," p. 370. 



Chapter hi 

Some Resorts and Ceremonies of the Capital 

To the men of London the coffee-houses, uncom- 
fortable though they were, with their wooden parti- 
tions and often narrow passages, were of greater 
importance than the pleasure-gardens, which were 
described in the last, though strictly they belong to 
this chapter. The West End beau, the merchant, the 
lawyer, and the shopkeeper, each had his favourite 
coffee-house ; it was the exchange, the club, the circu- 
lating library, the modern man's daily paper ; it 
touched almost every social and business want. From 
their number — in the first quarter of the century there 
were more than two thousand — and from the manner 
in which they met many demands of a generation 
which, intellectually and commercially, was growing 
more and more active within the bounds of eighteenth- 
century limitations, the London coffee-houses occupy 
a place which has given them unique historical im- 
portance. If the Londoner were a divine he could 
talk over the latest sermon of Clarke or of Romaine at 
Truby's or Child's in St. Paul's Churchyard, while 
the lawyer discussed the decisions in Westminster 
flaHTlit Nando's in Inner Temple Lane, or at the 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 35 

Grecianin Devereux Court. George's coffee-house, 
a little to the west of Temple Bar, was patronized rioF 
only 1Bj^_^ Templars, but by many others. " My 
company," writes Shenstone, in 1739, "goes to George's 
Coffee-house, where for that small subscription 
(one shilling) I read all pamphlets under a three- 
shilling dimension, and indeed any larger ones would 
not be fit for coffee-house perusal." * Authors, 
actors, dramatic amateurs, and wits could be seen at 
the Bedford, beneath the piazza of Covent Garden ; 
indeed, if one had walked through London in those 
days one would have constantly met with some coffee- 
house which had its particular set of patrons, where 
the attraction was not so much the twopenny dish 
of tea or coffee as the opportunity of meetings for 
the purpose either of pleasure or of business. 

At Lloyd's coffee-house, which, in 1692, was trans- 
ferred from Tower Street to Lombard Street, ship- 
owners and merchants used to assemble.^ It was there 
that the famous Lloyd's List first was published and 
sold. " Subscriptions," it was headed, " are taken in at 
three shillings a quarter at the bar of Lloyd's coffee- 
house in Lombard Street," and it was there also that 
the system of private underwriting of vessels, as 
opposed to the business of the London Insurance and 
the Royal Exchange Corporations, was carried on 
and developed. The insurance business transacted 
at Lloyd's coffee-house was transferred to the Royal 

^ " Works, Edition (1769)," vol. iii. p. 13. 

* Martin, *' History of Lloyd's and Marine Insurance," p. 62. 



36 COFFEE-HOUSES 

Exchange in 1754, and the results of the gatherings 
inside its homely walls are visible to-day wherever 
commerce extends, while its history affords perhaps 
the most striking example of the fact that these places 
of entertainment were patronized from no idle fashion 
of the time. They supplied a real want, and they 
disappeared, not because men were tired of them, but 
because society had outgrown them and, whether 
mercantile or fashionable, had discovered more 
convenient means of supplying its several wants. 

Of the coffee-house, the lounger, a term well under- 
stood in the eighteenth century, was the child, a 
clearly defined type of the time, who, without these 
establishments, could never have existed, [in our own 
day most of us have known the frequenter of clubs, the 
man always to be found in some particular room, but 
he is neither one of a type nor of a class. For he may 
be a billiard, or a bridge, player, a student or a racon- 
teur. But the eighteenth-century loungers strolled, 
or went in a coach, from one coffee-house to another. 
" They shift from coffee-houses and chocolate-houses 
from hour to hour, to get over the insupportable 
labour of doing nothing." ^,J They did not remain 
in one house, but the news which they picked up in 
the West End they carried to Temple Bar, and from 
Temple Bar to St. Paul's Churchyard, as they went 
disseminating and gathering information and gossip 
on every subject which interested the town. They 
were at once talkers and listeners, leisurely, intelligent, 
^ SpectatOTy No. 54. 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 37 

blessed with means of livelihood without labour, and 
never leaving London except for a short visit to Bath 
or Tunbridge Wells. The loungers begin and end 
as a class with the century, and they belong to it 
wholly in temperament, in manners, and in mode of 
life. 

/ An avidity for news and for criticisms of social and 
political events helped to supply the coffee-houses with 
customers, and newspapers with readers. ^ " Many a 
man," said Johnson, " who enters the coffee-house in 
his nightgown and slippers is called away to his shop 
or his dinner before he has well considered the state 
of Europe." An increasing desire for something 
fresher and larger than the slow newsletter was 
ministered to most effectively when Defoe, with 
his extraordinary insight into public opinion, started 
his Review. Other sheets, such for example as the 
Daily C our ant, issued in 1702, and which was 
the first English daily paper,* and the Post Boy, 
met the same need.^ The newspaper tax of 171 2 did 
not prevent the multiplication of journals, and in 1776 
the number of newspapers published in London had 
risen to fifty-three. 

The arrangements for their distribution were 
imperfect, and most persons found it cheapest and 
quickest to peruse them in a coffee-house, which often 
enabled the reader to comment on them to a friend, 
or to argue with a neighbour on the state of affairs, 

1 Grant, " The Newspaper Press," vol. i. p. 84. 

' Fox Bourne, " English Newspapers," vol, i. pp. 56, 6^, 



38 TAVERNS 

a piquant addition — some might think — to the 
perusal of the news of the day. This desire for 
information and the consequent supply of journals, 
combined with the need for association for the purpose 
of business or pleasure, produced these innumerable 
coffee-houses with their varied purposes, where we 
perceive very clearly the forces which underlay the 
daily life of the Londoner. 

Nearly every important provincial town had its 
one newspaper, but in^ London only was there a 
constant current of news from all parts of the world, 
conducing and ministering to a mental activity in 
singular contrast to the political apathy which pre- 
dominated, in spite of European wars, until the end 
of the centuryTy 

The taverns of a town have usually been a noticeable 
feature of the social life of the time ; but many of 
those of London in the eighteenth century are re- 
markable because they were the complement of the 
coffee-houses, and gave opportunities for association 
of a general character, supplementary to their use 
as mere eating-houses. The Londoner, whether he 
were a politician at the West End, a man of letters 
in Fleet Street, a merchant in Bishopsgate Street, 
or a tradesman in Cornhill, was almost certain to 
belong to one or more clubs which met at some tavern. 
The Brothers' Club — which in the beginning of 
the century was brought into being by Bolingbroke 
and Swift — dined at Ozinda's, in St. James's Street. 
Incidents in Johnson's life also illustrate this feature 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 39 

of the age — his creation of the Ivy Lane Club in 1746, 
at the King's Head in Ivy Lane, and of ^he Club, v^^ith 
Reynolds, in 1764, which, commencing at the Turk's 
Head in Gerrard Street, moved in turn to various 
taverns in the West End. At the end of his life 
Johnson inaugurated a small evening club at the 
Essex Head in Essex Street. 

In fact, the Londoner, especially in the first half 
of the eighteenth century, passed a large part of 
his time in coffee-houses and taverns, and when one 
sought him after midday he would often be found in 
a taverni^o habit was so universal in every class 
as this of association in some place of entertainment ; 
it was part of the life alike of the nobleman and of 
the tradesman.; While the former enjoyed himself 
in one of the numerous houses in the West End, the 
latter was surrounded by his business rivals and his 
business friends at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street, 
at the Sixpenny Card Club, or at the Free-and-Easy 
at the Queen's Arms in St. Paul's Churchyard. But 
when we go with the Londoner to his coffee-house or 
tavern we should think of him rather than of the place, 
for coffee-house and tavern were each only a building 
which, by reason of its existence, was the most con- 
venient for the purpose oi meetings, whether for 
business or for pleasure. iThe important fact is the 
remarkable and constant and informal association 
of men of like interests, tastes, or occupations for 
purposes political, commercial, literary, or social. 
These associations^ every one of whigh was usually 



40 CLUBS 

called a club, even if it were without rules or officers, 
sprang rapidly into being from the beginning of the 
century, so rapidly that places by no means always 
suitable had to be used for their meetings. Fre- 
quently those who came together assembled around a 
dinner table. An Englishman, it is said, must cele- 
brate any event by a dinner ; perhaps this custom has 
been exaggerated, it is at any rate a national char- 
acteristic. The Londoner of the eighteenth century 
had to meet his friends and associates within doors, 
and it was quite in accordance with the people and 
with the age that they should take a hearty meal 
together. The assembly dined about two o'clock, 
then as the century advanced the hour grew later. 
But whatever the time, the table was the place where 
a man could most conveniently meet with those of 
like mind or interest with himself. But the numerous 
associations in coffee-houses and taverns for every 
conceivable purpose could not have taken place except 
in a city where there was complete individual free- 
dom, an entire absence of governmental suspicion or 
supervision, and where, in spite of class differences, 
men of different grades and occupations consorted 
without ceremony. The political clubs of the age of 
Anne brought together men of the highest and lowest 
birth ; the Duke of Ormond sat at the same table 
with John Gay, who had once been a silkmercer's 
apprentice. The Club, which Dr. Johnson estab- 
lished in 1764, was equally marked by its tone of 
social equality. Though the City man was to some 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 41 

extent looked at with disdain by the beau from 
St. James's Street, there was in London in the eigh- 
teenth century a greater association between men 
of all degrees than in any other city at this period 
in any other country in the world. The modern 
democratic spirit is perceptible amidst divisions 
of rank, beneath the ceremonious phrases, the 
differences of dress, and the external appellations of 
the men who were gathered within the metropolis 
from St. James's Street to the Royal Exchange. In 
the meetings in the coffee-house and the tavern is 
especially visible the growth in this age not only of 
the democratic spirit, but of increasing mental activity, 
— of the various forces which go to make up life 
as we understand it in these days. 

The theatre was the chief indoor place of amuse- 
ment where all classes met, and it was only at the 
theatre that human passions and the tragedy and 
comedy of life could be studied, for the novel had not 
yet supplied men and women with an inexhaustible 
mass of imaginative literature, dealing alike with 
romantic and with commonplace lives. Indeed, even 
if books and newspapers had been abundant, the 
possibilities of reading at those times when the modern 
Londoner chiefly enjoys it, in the short and dark 
winter days, were small. In the eighteenth century, 
London was a city of darkness. It was the absence of 
powerful artificial illuminants that made the Londoner 
of every class an early riser, which forced him to his 
bed at an equally early hour — depriving him not a 



42 LIGHTING OF THE STREETS 

little of the pleasure of reading when he had most 
leisure for it — and made the streets unsafe after dark. 
It was not till the beginning of the nineteenth century 
(1807-1810) that the use of gas was introduced for the 
purpose of lighting streets and houses. Before 1736 
London was only lit from Michaelmas to Lady Day, 
and then only until midnight and on nights when 
there was no moon.^ A more systematic manner of 
lighting then came into force, but as compared with 
modern methods it was intolerably bad. Living in 
days when darkness can be dispelled in a moment, 
we can scarcely realise the plight of the Londoner, 
especially in winter, when the short day had come 
to an end. His only resource was an early de- 
parture to his bed, for the absence of light checked 
the interchange of society, and prejudiced rational 
amusements ; it tended to mental ignorance and to 
social disorder, and it was a strong barrier to the 
improvement not only of the London streets, but of 
the general condition of the Londoner. Light, in- 
deed, has been one of the most beneficent influences 
of later times, and its increase within and without 
the buildings of London has done not a little to 
mark the distinctions between the eighteenth and 
the succeeding centuries. 

If the Londoner was coarse-minded, brutal in some 
of his tastes, and illiterate, he was at any rate out- 
wardly religious ; but in his religion, as in politics and 

^ Lecky, " History of England in the Eighteenth Century," vol, i, 
p. 486. 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 43 

business, he was practical and unemotional ; he had a 
dislike of Popery, which he regarded as the cause of 
not a few of the constitutional disturbances which 
culminated in the Revolution, and of the disagreeable 
uncertainty which agitated the kingdom before the 
death of Queen Anne. He went to church not only 
on Sundays but also on week-days. Out of the one 
hundred and eleven churches in London in 1733, 
forty-four had a daily service, in most instances 
both in the morning and the evening, while in 
some churches there were more than this number. One 
hundred and twenty congregations of Nonconformists 
worshipped in their own fashion. The churches 
were, v\^ith the exception of those in Southwark, 
Westminster, and the parts immediately adjacent 
to the City, actually in the City itself, and the 
merchant or the draper walked with his family 
from his home in Lombard Street or Wood Street 
to and from St. Bartholomew's or St. Botolph's. 

In few of the London churches was an organ 
to be heard. They were filled with ugly pews 
dominated by a high pulpit, from which a divine 
preached an unimpassioned sermon to a congregation 
which regarded church-going as one of the recognized 
proprieties of existence. The London clergyman was 
well paid and well read in his own subject, and was 
often the holder of a degree in divinity ; he repre- 
sented the scholarly divine of the eighteenth century 
who discoursed to his audience with a large proportion 
of abstract reasoning and common sense. He had. 



44 CHURCHES 

says Leslie Stephen, " to stock the ordinary mind 
with a due provision of common-sense maxims which 
might serve to keep its proprietor out of mischief 
and make him a respectable member of society." 
The eighteenth century was unspiritual ; emotional 
religion, an intercourse between a personal Deity 
and humanity, were entirely foreign to the minds alike 
of preacher and congregation. Preacher and lay- 
man in London were equally satisfied with the existing 
order of things. Theological reasoning was intended 
to reconcile religious theories with the Church as it then 
existed, and the worthy merchant who lived a sober, 
charitable, and not too profane existence might well 
regard himself as on the high road to salvation He 
was a person worthy of imitation, and the occupant 
of the City pulpit, when he left questions of theology, 
was far from reproaching the sinfulness of the world 
in general and of his congregation in particular. 
Rather he desired that his flock should follow the 
example of the most respected of its members, and 
lead an honest and respectable life creditable to 
citizens of no mean city. 

Enthusiasm was so much suspected that in dis- 
cussions on the principles and grounds of religious 
belief — discussions raising ethical questions which 
were argued in a language often scarcely comprehen- 
sible to the ordinary layman — the vitality of religion 
was lost, and the whole mental atmosphere of the 
men of the time became more and more tranquil. 
The Londoner, untroubled by thoughts of a Popish 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 45 

prince and of a religion of which he was afraid, 
with Churchmen and Nonconformists comparatively 
at peace, found the political and social characteristics 
of the time accentuated both in his church and in 
his meeting-house. 

The conventionalism which is so marked a feature in 
the religious observances of the age is especially visible 
in marriage ceremonies. They were an odd mixture 
of superficial religion and revelry. There must be a 
religious ceremony ; whether it were performed by a 
broken-down parson in a tavern off Fleet Street, or by 
a divine in a West End church, was immaterial. The 
idea of anything in the nature of a sacrament, of any 
divine binding of human ties, was wholly absent. 
Fleet marriages, it has been said, prevailed, partly from 
a desire to save expense, as special licences were costly, 
and partly because banns were regarded as coarse ; 
but the latter reason does not accord with in- 
numerable features of the Londoner's daily life, and 
he did not begrudge his money on the festivities at 
home, which lasted for two or three days. The true 
reason was the attitude of the Londoner towards 
religious rites, which he regarded only as necessary 
formalities. Fleet marriages were ended by Lord 
Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753, which required 
that a marriage should be preceded either by the 
publication of banns for three Sundays, or by the issue 
of a licence, which could not in the case of minors be 
granted without the consent of parents or guardians. 
The Act put an end to innumerable scandals — the 



46 FLEET MARRIAGES 

marriage in taverns and public-houses of men who were 
so drunk that they were married without their know- 
ledge, and the clandestine taking away of young 
girls ; but it also terminated a practice which was 
undoubtedly found convenient by all classes of the 
community. Nearly three thousand Fleet marriages 
had, it was shown by a Parliamentary return, occurred 
in four months, and one Fleet parson had married 
a hundred and seventy-three couples in a day.^ 
Allowing for sham and fraudulent marriages, the num- 
ber of these ceremonies was in excess of anything which 
could have been caused by fraud and debauchery 
alone. The Act increased morality, improved society, 
altered fundamentally the conditions necessary for 
the validity of a marriage, and destroyed a travesty 
of a religious ceremony. It did not, however, make 
the Londoner more sincerely religious. 

More serious ideas of the marriage ceremony must 
be dated from the religious reaction which began with 
the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield, and which 
produced the evangelical revival in the Church of 
England after the middle of the century, though 
its effects on the general body of the inhabitants 
of London were not visible for many years. They 
were less susceptible to the stirring addresses of 
evangelical preachers, clerical or lay, than were the 
people of the provincial towns and even the dwellers 
in remote villages ; and the remarkable preaching of 

1 Burn, " History of Fleet Marriages." Sydney, " England and 
the English in the Eighteenth Century," vol. ii. p. 380. 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 47 

Romaine, who, week by week, taught justification 
by faith from the pulpit of St. Dunstan-in-the West, 
and later of St* Anne's, Blackfriars, was altogether 
exceptional, sometimes meeting with opposition, and 
sometimes causing large numbers to attend, many of 
whom, it may be suspected, listened to him only from 
curiosity. 

A wedding, as has just been hinted, was not in 
those days the affair of a morning or an afternoon. 
Holidays in London were but few, and unquestionably 
a wedding was seized upon as an opportunity for 
merrymaking. In these festivals the London of the 
eighteenth century retained many of the customs 
of mediaeval England. They " lasted two or three 
days ; there was no honeymoon, no wedding journey ; 
the young couple remained in their own house ; the 
wedding tour, with the bridesmaid for companion, 
came later." That a wedding journey as we now 
understand it should be uncommon was a necessity 
of a time when travelling was difficult. " After 
the celebration in the church there was a great banquet 
given by the bride's father ; there was dancing and 
music after the feast ; outside the butchers performed 
with the marrow bones and cleavers ; the bridegroom, 
whose duty it was to wait upon the guests, gave the 
broken meat to the poor." ^ Everything again is 
typical of the age — material enjoyment after a purely 
formal religious ceremony. 

In none of the events of human life has ceremony 

^ Besant, " London in the Eighteenth Century," p. 264. 



48 FUNERALS 

played so large a part as in funerals, and in a period 
such as the eighteenth century, marked by the absence 
of simplicity and by an exaggerated decorum, which 
was in contrast with a frequent coarseness of speech 
and action, it was certain that funerals would be 
noticeable for their artificiality and ostentation. 
This aspect of a melancholy rite was more especially 
prominent in London, where men were wealthy and 
well-to-do, and where all the trappings of woe were at 
hand. To meet the requirements of the parishioners, 
many of the London churches kept handsome velvet 
palls ; the smallness of the parishes enabled mourners 
to walk to church and the procession moved over the 
short distance from the house to the grave headed by 
one or more beadles, with twelve or more pall-bearers ; 
the mourners followed two by two ; the church was 
hung with black, and plumes were borne before the 
coffin. It was a moment when the wealth and 
respectability of the merchant or the lawyer could be 
shown to the world. This panoply of woe, this 
complete hiding of natural human feeling under 
a mass of ceremonial among the middle and upper 
sections of society, continued for many years, indeed 
is still apparent, remaining a marked instance of 
eighteenth-century formalism, a formalism which was 
remarkable in London. 

Nor was ostentation at funerals confined to the 
upper classes. The mechanic paid part of his earn- 
ings in his lifetime that he might be glorified at 
his death. For this purpose he belonged to a burial 



RESORTS AND CEREMONIES 49 

club, the usual form of subscription being a shilling 
from every living member on the death of one of their 
fellows. Thus a substantial coffin, black cloaks, hoods 
and scarves could be supplied ; large numbers of 
the trade followed the body of their comrade to the 
grave, usually during the night, and the ceremony 
ended with a feast of cake and wine. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Women of the Capital 

The mediaeval woman was essentially a housewife and 
a nurse ; the excessive families which she produced, 
even if not entirely reared, caused her time to be occu- 
pied with her children, and gave work to those who 
could care for their younger brothers and sisters. 
When she was not a nurse she was a housekeeper. 

The life of a woman was little different in the town 
or the country, in or out of London, and in the eigh- 
teenth century in London in essentials she was the 
same as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
though indications were not wanting of an increasing 
mental range and activity, and of an improving social 
condition. The wife of the tradesman, it was com- 
plained, " must have her fine clothes, her chaise or 
pad, with country lodgings, and go three times a week 
to public diversions." In other words, she was no 
longer content to sit at home and make her clothes. 
They could be bought, and she had money with which 
to purchase them, and she was not going to remain 
a mere drudge, when her husband went to his club 
and her son to Ranelagh. In her, too, the modern 
spirit of individuality was working. If Genoa velvets 

50 



THE WOMEN OF THE CAPITAL 51 

and Mantua silks were exhibited in the shops of Lud- 
gate Hill, why was she not to buy th^m and wear them 
and show them to the world ? Money was plentiful, 
opportunity was at hand, and the woman of the 
eighteenth century was not going to remain longer 
only a housewife. A few women had begun to attract 
attention by reason of their mental activity, and 
those whose minds had vitality were stimulated by 
their example. " Mrs. Montague," enthusiastically 
exclaimed Fanny Burney, " is our sex's glory." Mrs. 
Thrale and her coterie worshipped brightness, they 
were always looking for it, and they exaggerated the 
least departure from dullness into wit. Spasmodically 
and partially, the minds of women in London were 
awakening, showing their mental activity in the 
production of books, in association with men of 
ability, in the search after bright verbal expression, 
in contempt for the country cousin. " His daughters," 
wrote Fanny Burney of the children of Robert Raikes 
of Gloucester, the philanthropist, with suggestive 
scorn, " are a common sort of country misses." 

Though the woman of London was beginning to 
emerge from the servile position of past centuries, 
she was not in the matter of education a bit better 
than her country cousin. Of education, as we under- 
stand it, she had next to none. She was taught read- 
ing and writing and useful and ornamental needle- 
work, when she was in her teens ; when she grew a 
little older she learnt to dance, to play on the piano, 
the harpsichord, or the guitar, perhaps to speak French 



52 OCCUPATIONS OF WOMEN 

and to play cards. Women who had been ladies' 
maids, or poor creatures who had no other means 
of livelihood, were the teachers ; system was entirely 
absent ; the subjects taught were few, and the in- 
struction was superficial. Mental cultivation came 
chiefly from the pupil herself — from picking up her 
father's books, from intellectual interests casually 
excited and equally casually directed to some subject 
which attracted her. 

But though the interests of the women of London 
were becoming less narrow, and their lives were 
enlarged, yet their days were generally monotonous. 
Monotony is not wearisome to those who have never 
felt the need for variety ; but at this time the increasing 
variety in the lives of men reacted on the women of 
the age, who found in cards the chief antidote to the 
dullness which they began to realize. When card- 
playing is general it naturally follows that among 
those who are heedless the pastime will develop into 
gambling. But gambling among women in London 
in the eighteenth century was certainly not extensive, 
and was confined to fashionable ladies in the West 
End. Card-playing was, however, more common 
among women than among men. While these were 
talking at their taverns, the women were passing the 
time at the card tables. It is an example of the 
way in which the life of a section of the community 
is regarded as representative, that the doings in St. 
James's Street have created the idea that gambling 
was general in London. Fox, at his faro bank j 



THE WOMEN OF THE CAPITAL 53 

Selwyn forming what he called a " tie," that is 
arranging to pay to some friend twenty guineas for 
every ten which he should lose above fifty guineas 
in order to prevent himself from playing at high 
stakes ; young Lord Stavordale losing eleven thousand 
pounds at one sitting ; Lady Mary Coke carefully 
adding up her modest losses of seventy or a hundred 
guineas at " lu," were the leaders of a small though 
conspicuous coterie. The man of business^ the lawyer, 
and the doctor did not play cards so much as 
their wives and daughters, who turned to them to 
break the monotony which was as yet unstirred by 
novels, by many places of amusement, and by facility 
of locomotion which, more than anything else, has 
changed the course of the lives of women. Cards, 
tea-gardens, shopping, seem but a poor antidote to 
the dullness of making jams and pickles, getting up 
linen, or pulling silver-thread in the parlour. But 
all the thousand-and-one occupations of a purely 
domestic life required some personal activity and 
represented part of the round of a wholesome home- 
life, and this, after all, was the essential feature in 
winter and summer, in youth and age, of the woman 
of London as of her country sister. It produced no 
little activity and some independence, and unquestion- 
ably an ordered freedom. It probably accounts for 
the marked difference between the efforts of the 
French and the English woman at this time, for the 
intellectual woman of London was not in the least 
subjective. She was quiet and tranquil, and seldom 



54 POOR WOMEN 

desired to reign over a brilliant salon. The girl of 
London, if she learnt less than the child who in Paris 
passed her days in a convent, was brought up, if in 
ignorance, yet in freedom, and in contact with boys 
and youths, so that, although her interests were largely 
engrossed by clothes and cards, she developed into a 
free and healthy creature. 

The coarseness and brutality which marked the 
lower classes of Englishmen in the eighteenth century 
were equally noticeable among the poorer women of 
London. It is a sign of increasing civilization when 
physical work is more and more allotted to men, in 
those times many things were done by women which 
are now the task only of men. Women sometimes 
enlisted in the army or volunteered into the navy, 
and instances of women disguised as men, and en- 
gaged in civil occupation are frequent. Much of the 
work about the Thames side was done by women, 
and they cultivated most of the market gardens by 
which the metropolis was surrounded, carried the 
produce to market on their heads, and hawked it 
through the streets. Everywhere the courtesan was 
seen — banned in theory by the law, she was still found 
all over London, only the poorest, who could not 
bribe the constable, being hurried to the bridewell. 

Self-respect and education were not yet universal 
among the middle and upper classes, and so large 
numbers of the poorer women were both coarse and 
degraded. But unquestionably their condition was, 
in spite of these failings, improving in a marked degree. 



THE WOMEN OF THE CAPITAL 55 

We see this by the fact that the London housewife 
of the eighteenth century was already beginning to 
complain bitterly of her servants. They were said 
to be exorbitant in their demand for higher wages, 
which, from thirty to forty shillings a year at the 
beginning of the century, had, towards the middle 
and later period of the age, increased to six, seven, and 
eight pounds. The mistress, too, complained that 
her servants were too well educated, too independent, 
too fond of fine clothes ; " scarcely a wench,'^ com- 
plains a lady in Johnson's paper in the Idler (1750), 
where Betty Brown tells the story of her life, " was 
to be got for all work, since education had made such 
numbers of fine ladies that nobody would now accept 
a lower title than that of waiting-maid, or something 
that might qualify her to wear laced shoes and long 
ruffles and to sit at work in the parlour window." 
And, says another contemporary writer, " plain 
country Jane is changed into a fine London madam." 
These and many similar facts are striking evidence of 
the change for the better in all classes of society, 
marking, in regard to servants, an advance from a 
condition little different from slavery, or something like 
it, to that of free individuals giving their services in 
exchange for a fair return of money. It meant that 
servants were beginning to obtain higher remuneration, 
that locomotion, in spite of bad roads and many 
difficulties, was easier, so that the rural districts 
could supply the capital with workpeople — the 
beginning of a movement which to-day is one of the 



X 



S6 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON 

most common features of English social life. It 
meant also that the interests of daily existence were 
becoming larger, and that the differences between the 
several classes of which society is formed were becoming 
less marked, we are, in fact, on the threshold of modern 
English life. 

It is fatal to a proper appreciation of any epoch in 
the past to consider it from a modern point of view. 
Neither the agreeable nor disagreeable aspects of the 
eighteenth century gave as much pleasure or as much 
pain to the men of the age, we may be sure, as they 
appear to us to do. Put a modern Londoner on the 
top of a coach for a drive to Oxford ; if the weather 
and company be pleasant he will probably say he had 
never spent a more enjoyable day in his life ; if 
circumstances are adverse, his comments on his day's 
expedition will be equally adverse. But the Londoner 
who in 1750 set out from Holborn to drive to Cam- 
bridge took the good and the bad of the time with an 
equal mind. Will Marvel's imaginary adventures 
in his journey to Devonshire were, after all, only 
amusing exaggerations of the common vicissitudes 
of the traveller in rain and sunshine, and many social 
and natural features, which seem to us intolerable, 
would be passed over with scarcely a complaint. 
To us, with modern London extending for many 
miles from its centre — a series of monotonous streets 
— the parks and the numerous public gardens of the 
eighteenth century, the rural aspect of the districts 
immediately around London, the clear and stately 



THE WOMEN OF THE CAPITAL 57 

river with its ships and boats, appeal, if we realize 
the town in the aggregate, with singular force, to 
our forefathers they were part of their ordinary 
existence. Unquestionably they made London very 
agreeable, and they tended to tranquillity, to variety 
of outward aspect — a fortunate circumstance in days 
when change of scene was difficult of attainment 
even by the prosperous. But after all, allowing 
for obvious defects, London in the eighteenth cen- 
tury must have been an uncommonly enjoyable place 
to its inhabitant. He lived in a tranquil age, he 
was an observer, rather than a figure, in the process 
of national development. Only in literature and in 
art were there in London signs of the evolution of 
national energy. In the towns and districts of the 
Midlands and of the North, striking industrial move- 
ments were in progress which were changing the face 
of England, bringing into play new political and social 
forces, and altering the elements of society. We may 
admit that the Londoner had no high ideals, that he was 
sunk in a good-natured conservatism, that the political 
state was torpid, that society was gross, and that the 
lives of most women were extremely monotonous. 
But with all these defects London was the capital 
of Great Britain, and its inhabitants realized the fact. 
It had all the characteristics of a capital, a governing 
class which was in evidence out of all proportion to 
its numbers, and a middle class which looked down on 
those who lived outside the metropolis ; it was the 
seat of government, the centre of literary and political 



S8 LONDON AND PARIS 

activity, the resort of foreigners. Ignorant as its 
people often were, the town was quite unprovincial. 
Its very position, somewhat apart from the rest of 
the Kingdom, and within measurable distance of 
the Continent, and especially of France, tended to 
sustain an interest in European as well as in home 
affairs. London and Paris in the eighteenth century 
were in fact the only cities which had the attributes 
of capitals, and it was partly from this fact that a 
social intimacy between the leaders of society in 
France and in England was possible and actual. 



CHAPTER V 
The City of Pleasure 

The more closely we survey English society in the 
eighteenth century, looking back on its men and 
women, on their daily life, their habits and their 
habitations, the more we are struck by the intimate 
connection of Bath with the century. It strikes the 
mind with a sense of surprise, it is full of contrasts. 
As a town, as a haunt of men, it differed altogether 
from any other place in England, for it was essentially 
a City of Pleasure. As such it emerges with, and like- 
wise vanishes with, the century, as such too, its society 
has gone to keep company with that of Pompeii and 
Herculaneum, for Bath of the eighteenth century 
is as much a piece of antiquity as is the City of Aquae 
Solis. The social milieu and the personal atmo- 
sphere which was peculiar to it have departed. One 
may still find places — old-country and cathedral towns 
— ^where, though centuries have passed away, and new 
generations of men have come and gone, the localities 
have not altogether lost their ancient atmosphere. 
But the material and quite substantial remnants of the 
eighteenth century in Bath no more retain the human 
characteristics of the particular age in which they 

59 



6o THE RISE OF BATH 

were built than do the Roman baths the life of the 
Roman town ; both are now mere architectural 
antiquities. Yet there are still gathered round the 
warm and perpetual springs of a town in a secluded 
and picturesque part of England men and women 
seeking from these healing waters relief from bodily 
ills as they did nineteen centuries ago, when these 
same springs were the centre of the Roman baths — 
among the remains of which strangers now ramble 
— and of the agreeable but now departed villas of the 
city of Aquae Solis. Throughout the Middle Ages 
the same attraction drew the stranger to this im- 
portant city in the valley of the Avon. But gradually 
the modern characteristics of the place emerge from the 
hazy past as descriptive writing grows and preserves 
local features for future readers. The invaluable 
Leland pictures Bath, as he did so many of the places 
of Elizabethan England, with its " temperate and 
pleasant springs much frequented of people diseased 
with various horrid ills " and " great aches." From 
that point of time we see it more clearly, gradually be- 
coming, difficult as travelling was along the founderous 
roads of rural England, a Mecca of the sick, the rendez- 
vous especially of noblemen and of the affluent, and at 
last of royalty itself in the person of Anne of Denmark, 
the consort of James I. 

To reach Bath in those days was a tiresome and even 
dangerous expedition ; its cost prevented any but 
people of means from undertaking it, and the rich 
in the seventeenth century were chiefly great landed 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 6i 

proprietbrs. In 1663 came the visit of Charles 11. 
and his Queen, which drew more attention to the 
value of the waters, and then that of Queen Anne in 
1702, which was the beginning of the remarkable 
period which continued throughout the eighteenth 
century, when Bath held a unique position in 
the social history of England. We may follow the 
fortunes of the city from that interesting epoch to 
our own time, when it has fallen to a tranquil 
and rather dull watering-place, the abiding interest 
of which lies in the unexampled depiction, by its 
streets, its crescents, its circus, and its many remark- 
able houses, of the external aspect of the pleasure 
city of England in the eighteenth century. Here 
were gathered, as nowhere else, a representative 
collection of society — the nobleman, the squire, the 
rich merchant, the affluent professional man, the 
politician, the author, the player, and the gambler, 
with the ^various women folk, more or less virtuous, 
necessarily attendant on so kaleidoscopic an assemblage. 
Such, in a word, was the gay and fashionable Bath 
of the eighteenth century, which remains permanently 
depicted in the pages of novelists, dramatists, and 
letter-writers. 

Many of those who came thither to take the baths 
or to drink the waters were more or less ailing ; but 
the greater number who were supposed to require the 
aid of the healing springs, were imaginary invalids, 
who made the waters an excuse for change of amuse- 
ment, and for social intercourse. Around this coUec- 



62 THE SOCIETY OF BATH 

tion of persons who came with a real or fictitious 
purpose was gathered a large and miscellaneous crowd, 
openly and frankly attracted to Bath simply and solely 
for pleasure. Here, for example, " a man has daily 
opportunities of seeing the most remarkable characters 
of the community. He sees them in their natural 
attitudes and true colours, descended from their 
pedestals, and divested of their formal draperies, 
undisguised by art and affectation. Here we have 
ministers of state, judges, generals, bishops, projectors, 
philosophers, wits, poets, players, chemists, fiddlers, 
and buffoons . . . Another entertainment peculiar to 
Bath arises from the general mixture of all degrees, 
assembled in our public rooms without distinction 
of rank or fortune." ^ Bath was the only place in 
England which responded to a complex demand — the 
demand for social intercourse unfettered by formality 
or by differences of rank, for change of air, and for 
new scenes sufficiently rural to satisfy, without dis- 
comfort, the desire for country life, the full appreciation 
of which was as yet unattained by the habitue of 
St. James's Street, who was not able to find enjoyment 
in sport or in country pleasures, and who had an 
unmitigated contempt for the manners of the ordinary 
country gentleman. To the man of letters, and to 
the wit of the coffee-house, the fox-hunting squire 
was the personification of ignorance and of bad 
manners, and he in his turn looked on the one as 
wanting in all manly qualities and on the other as 
1 Smollett, " Humphrey Clinker " (ed. 1811), p. 50. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 63 

contemptibly conceited. Yet at Bath each of these 
antagonistic characters met on common ground, the 
squire and his wife and daughter finding there the 
only place where the pleasures of the capital could be 
enjoyed within measurable distance of the manor- 
house, and where town fashions could be studied and 
town amusements followed without the irksomeness 
of a stay in a great city. Quite early in the century 
(1714) Pope, evidently in a good humour, sitting — ^we 
may imagine — in the autumn sunlight, watching the 
throng moving to and fro about the entrance to the 
Pump Room, wrote to his friends, the Blounts : " From 
the window where I am seated I command the prospect 
of twenty or thirty yards in one of the finest prome- 
nades in the world, every moment that I take my eye 
off from the paper. If variety of diversions and new 
objects be capable of driving our friends out of our 
minds, I have the best excuse imaginable for forgetting 
you ; for I have slid, I can't tell how, into all the 
amusements of the place. My whole day is shared by 
the Pump assemblies, the walks, the chocolate-houses, 
raffling-shops, medleys, etc. ... I endeavour (like 
all awkward fellows) to become agreeable by imitation ; 
and, observing who are most in favour with the fair, 
I sometimes copy the civil air of Gascoin, sometimes 
the impudent one of Nash, and sometimes, for vanity, 
the silly one of a neighbour of yours, who has lost to 
the gamesters here that money of which the ladies 
only deserve to rob a man of his age." ^ Later in 

^ *' Pope's Works " (Elwin & Courthope), vol. ix. p. 251. 



64 OPINIONS OF FREQUENTERS 

the period, Mrs. Delany, a good judge of the world, 
wrote to Swift (1736), " I think Bath a more comfort- 
able place to live in than London ; all the entertain- 
ments of the place lie in a small compass, and you are 
at your liberty to let them alone just as it suits your 
humour." ^ Mrs. Delany was herself an excellent 
example of many cultivated and sensible women who 
found year after year in Bath a scene of congenial 
recreation — pleasure without toil, companionship 
without effort, and freedom from social duties and 
the often equally troublesome bonds of a forced so- 
called pleasure. As Mrs. Thrale, a constant and a 
lifelong lover of Bath, said, at the end of the century, 
it was the place which best could lengthen and most 
could gladden life. 

Cynical opinions of Bath might be formed by less 
kindly natures than these agreeable women, especially 
if one liked to dwell on the seamy side of human nature. 
Of this Smollett is the great depicter. Roderick 
Random and Peregrine Pickle are the central figures in 
a society of rakes and gamblers. After many adventures 
by land and sea, the one goes to Bath to pick up an 
heiress — Miss Snapper the daughter of a Turkey 
merchant, who had been bequeathed a fortune — the 
other to distinguish himself in the fashionable world. 
Arrived at Bath, each finds himself surrounded by a 
selfish and disreputable crowd. These novels, which 
take their titles from Smollett's two heroes, were 
written in 1748 and 1751, and may be accepted as true 

1 "Autobiography," vol. i. p. 553. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 65 

pictures of parts of the society of Bath at the middle 
of the century. But too much regard should not be 
paid to the particular section of society which figures 
so vividly in Smollett's pages. At that time it suited 
his talent and his fancy to depict that part of society 
which he knew well, but later in his life he shows us a 
more quiet and more honourable company and, though 
manners may have generally softened between 1751 
and 1 77 1, the difference in the atmosphere of Smollett's 
earlier and later works is caused by his intention to 
present different sides of life at Bath. 

"Bath," says Goldsmith, "came into vogue be- 
cause people of fashion had no agreeable summer 
retreat from the town (London) and usually spent that 
season amidst a solitude of country squires, parsons' 
wives, and visiting tenants or farmers ; they wanted 
some place where they might have each other's 
company and win each other's money as they had 
done during the winter in town." To the country 
folk Bath was a unique city, more lively, more 
amusing, and more diverting than any of the 
provincial capitals, such as Shrewsbury in the 
north-west and Norwich in the east ; Londoners 
found it gayer and more comfortable than Tunbridge 
Wells with its rural attractions. Thus two streams 
met year by year at Bath, and only at Bath — the 
stream from the metropolis and the stream from 
the rural districts of the West, the South and the 
Midlands of England — increased by recruits from 
among the business and commercial classes of Bristol, 
5 



66 COSMOPOLITANISM OP BATH 

each stream being impelled to this centre by influences 
and tendencies and temporal facts peculiar to the par- 
ticular age, which did not exist before, and which 
vanished under the effect of an increasing population 
and the growth of progress during the succeeding 
century — the improvement of locomotion,^ the 
increase of light literature, the spread of general 
knowledge, and the more frequent intermixture of 
the different classes throughout the country. 

The social cosmopolitanism of Bath was more than 
superficial ; it indicated the fortunate facility with 
which the English people have fused the several classes 
for all practical and public purposes. The landed 
aristocracy were yet for many years to come to be the 
chief administrators of English government, but the 
growth of industrial energy and of the influence of 
capital — that growth of the " moneyed men," which 
had been so disagreeable a spectacle to the Tories in 
the reign of Queen Anne — was to be seen in social 
circles in Bath. The active persons who had returned 
with a fortune from the Colonies or India were by no 
means welcome to many of the other frequenters of 
Bath. " Every upstart of fortune," writes gouty Squire 
Bramble, " harnessed in the trappings of the mode, 
presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of ob- 

^ The gradual change in the speed of travelling, even by coach, 
is illustrated by the fact that in 1750 the time on the journey from 
London to Bath w^as three days. In 1776 Johnson started at 11 a.m., 
and arrived the next day at 7 p.m. In 1827 Dickens makes his 
hero leave at 7 a.m. and arrive at 7.30 p.m. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE (^^ 

servation. Clerks and factors from the East Indies, 
loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces ; planters, 
negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plan- 
tations, enriched they know not how ; agents, com- 
missaries, and contractors, who had fattened, in two 
successive wars, on the blood of the nation ; usurers, 
brokers, and jobbers of every kind ; men of low birth 
and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly 
translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former 
ages ; and no wonder that their brains should be 
intoxicated with pride, vanity, and presumption. 
Knowing no other criterion of greatness but the os- 
tentation of wealth, they discharge their affluence with- 
out taste or conduct through every channel of the 
most absurd extravagance ; and all of them hurry to 
Bath, because here, without any further qualification, 
they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the 
land. Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen, 
who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey upon the blubber of 
those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected with 
the same rage of displaying their importance; and 
the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext 
to insist upon being conveyed to Bath, where they 
may hobble country-dances and cotillions among 
lordlings, squires, counsellors, and clergy. These 
delicate creatures from Bedfordbury, Butcher Row, 
Crutched Friars, and Botolph Lane, cannot breathe in 
the gross air of the lower town, or conform to the 
vulgar rules of a common lodging house ; the husband, 
therefore, must provide an entire house, or elegant 



68 FASHIONABLE SOCIETY 

apartments in the new buildings. Such is the composi- 
tion of what is called the fashionable company at 
Bath, where a very inconsiderable proportion of genteel 
people are lost in a mob of impudent plebeians, who 
have neither understanding nor judgment, nor the 
least idea of propriety and decorum, and seem to 
enjoy nothing so much as an opportunity of insulting 
their betters." * 

The plebeian was, in other words, the man of com- 
merce, and the " genteel people " were the great 
landed proprietors and the country squires, the latter 
being especially nervous of the growing power of the 
men of business, whom the former regarded with 
some disdain, but without fear, for the position 
of the nobility was too secure to be affected by the 
influx of merchants and manufacturers, however 
wealthy. 

In London the nabob, as it was the fashion to call 
the merchant who had made his fortune in the East, 
was beginning to obtain a footing in Parliament and 
among politicians, since his wealth enabled him to buy 
one or more pocket boroughs. But a seat at West- 
minster did not necessarily give an entree either to a 
fashionable club in St. James's Street, or to an aristo- 
cratic mansion in Bloomsbury. At Bath, however, 
the nabob and his family could meet in the Pump Room 
the best bred people in England, though their pleasure 
in so doing was in some degree spoilt by the necessity 
pf rubbing shoulders with the wives and daughters of 
i " Humphrey Clinker " (ed. 1811), p. n. 



% 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 69 

the " low tradesmen," who, as well as the merely 
wealthy frequenters of Bath, were impartially dis- 
liked by the Squire Brambles of the age — that is, by 
the county gentry. 

The basis of the pleasures of Bath was, in fact, 
social intercourse, the meeting of men and women 
of all grades of society without formality, and with 
the object of enjoying themselves. From a modern 
point of view, Bath, even in the height of its fame, 
might appear to some to have been a dull place. 
Concerts, theatrical performances, card parties, 
assemblies, picnics, and drives, in themselves alone 
do not form a particularly intellectual series of amuse- 
ments. But they brought people together, many of 
whom led tedious lives at home, and so there 
prevailed a feeling of gaiety and of bonhomie, which 
was the permanent and prevailing note of the place. 

It would be an exaggeration to say, because Bath had 
this unique power of drawing to it, and there, as it 
were, mingling together various sections of society 
above the lower ranks of the English people, that it 
had a distinct effect on the national character. One 
cannot, however, doubt that this intermixture of 
diverse classes year after year throughout a century 
must have had some influence on the general develop- 
ment of English society. During their visits to 
Bath politicians became better acquainted with the 
growing importance of men of business ; the country 
squire was introduced to the shipowner from 
London and Bristol and to the wit from town. But 



70 INFLUENCES ON SOCIETY 

the influence of Bath, whilst unquestionably powerful, 
was also largely indefinable. It is impossible, in sur- 
veying the growth of this intercourse, to indicate 
distinct evidences of a change of feeling, however 
much we may be sure that it existed. The milieu 
of Bath was essentially one of pleasure, and its tem- 
porary inhabitants, as has been said, were largely 
pleasure-seekers, so that it is easy amidst its scandals, 
its egotism, its petty social ambitions and strifes, 
to lose sight of the larger influences of the place, and 
of the indication which is visible of impending changes 
in English society, of the craving at this time of various 
sections of the people to emerge into a freer day, to 
have a less restricted life than heretofore, to move 
from home, to meet their fellow-men — in fact to be 
modern. 

It has followed from its peculiar position in the 
eighteenth century that Bath occupies a striking place 
in the fiction and drama of the age alike in the pages 
of Fielding, of Smollett, and of Miss Austen, and in 
the plays of Foote and Sheridan. For nowhere were 
characters of the most varied kind more easily studied, 
nowhere were the opportunities of finding subjects 
for the new school of personal characterization, for 
the analysis of temperaments and motives, more near 
at hand than in the City of Pleasure. 

The indraught to one centre of men and women 
with the most opposite pursuits and of the most 
divergent interests, with leisure as well as money, 
made it an admirable field for the portrait painter. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 71 

"My son," Mrs. Barber wrote to Swift, in 1736, 
" who is learning to paint, goes on well, and if he be 
in the least approved of, in all probability he may do 
well at Bath, for I never saw a painter that came hither 
fail of getting more business than he could do, be him 
ever so indifferent." ^ Later in the century William 
Hoare, one of the first members of the Royal Academy, 
a capable and industrious artist, had many patrons, 
Pitt, Lord Camden, and Pope being among those 
who sat to him. Barker, " of Bath," spent his 
whole life, during the latter half of the century, at 
work in this city on landscapes and portraits. But 
the two great painters who are permanently associated 
with Bath are Gainsborough and Lawrence, more 
especially Gainsborough, and the years (i 760-1 774) 
which he spent at Bath are conterminous with the 
most interesting time in its history. He settled 
in the Circus (No. 24) in such fine apartments that 
his prudent wife was frightened at the probable 
expense of living in that dignified and agreeable 
locality, where Chatham built himself a house (No. 7), 
and where to-day in its stately quiet one almost 
expects to meet the infirm peer carried in a chair 
from the baths. 

Among the portraits which Gainsborough painted 
during this period are those of nearly all the notable 
persons who came to the city. The Duke of Cumber- 
land, Lord Chesterfield, Lady Ligonier, Wade — who 
succeeded Nash as master of the ceremonies — the 
1 Cited, Barb^au's " B^tli " (English edition), p. 287 (note). 



72 GAINSBOROUGH AT BATH 

Lindleys, and Garrick, are among those who sat to 
him. This enumeration indicates the mixed and 
cosmopolitan life of the town. The pleasant scenery 
around the city also gave Gainsborough constant 
subjects for landscapes ; " The Cottage Door " and 
" The Watering Place " belong to this period, and 
to-day an elm near the road from Bath to London 
is known as Gainsborough's Elm. But apart from 
his work as an artist, Gainsborough is not largely 
identified with the social life of Bath. His was a 
reticent nature. No one was more alive to the daily 
exhibition of human character which Bath offered, but 
he probably saw too much of the frequenters of the 
place as sitters and as the friends of sitters to care 
to mingle in their general life, and preferred to amuse 
himself at home on his violin or hautboy, or to chat 
with Quin, rather than to play cards or attend a dance 
at the Assembly Rooms. 

A modern critic has noticed the considerable 
advance as a painter which Gainsborough made after 
he came to Bath on the advice of his good-natured 
and rather officious friend Thicknesse, and has ascribed 
it to the opportunities he now had — which were 
unobtainable at Ipswich — -of seeing fine masterpieces 
at Wilton Castle and other country-houses. But it 
may be doubted if such occasional visits would have 
this effect, and the greater power and scope of Gains- 
borough after he settled at Bath are due, probably, to 
the confidence arising from immediate success, and from 
the mental stimulus received from daily intercourse 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 73 

with many men of the highest parts. " Why, sir," he 
wrote to Henderson, the actor, in 1773, " what makes 
the difference between man and man is real perform- 
ance, and not genius or conception." 

If Bath were not the scene of strenuous lives, at 
any rate those who had taken part in great affairs, 
and those who in the future were to make their 
mark, rested there for a while, and Gainsborough was 
daily in their stimulating company. His sojourn at 
Bath marks the beginning of " real performance," the 
seizing of the highest position in his art, whilst in his 
life it comprises a period of happy days, of easy yet 
continuous work in a society often of distinguished, 
generally of interesting and representative men. 

Lawrence is a less noteworthy and important figure 
on the gay scene than Gainsborough, for during his 
life at Bath he was not much more than an infant 
prodigy. He began work in pastels at Bath in 1782, 
at the early age of eleven, and remained there for 
six years, when he became a student at the Royal 
Academy Schools in London. One would suppose 
that it was impossible for a child to have more 
than an artistic facility, and that the work which he 
did at Bath would probably be due to the personal 
attraction and chatter of a delightful lad ; but the 
inherent gifts of Lawrence were abnormal, and his 
studio was crowded. Among those whose portraits 
he drew during these few years were Mrs. Siddons, 
the Bishop of Durham, Lord Barrington, and 
Others whose favour showed how much leisure they 



74 AN ATMOSPHERE OF PLEASURE 

had to occupy, rather than the actual greatness of 
Lawrence as an artist in those early days. But if 
famous frequenters of Bath idled away their time in 
the studios of Gainsborough and Lawrence, there 
were others who fancied that it would amuse them 
to become amateur artists. Hard work was the last 
thing that a pleasure-seeker at Bath desired, and 
opportunely enough an ingenious and clever artist 
made his appearance in the middle of the century, 
who " professed to teach amateurs how to produce 
pretty pictures without imposing on them the necessity 
of study." * Alexander Cozens was an illegitimate 
son of Peter the Great, and came from Italy to England 
in 1746 ; a few years later he appeared at Bath, and 
has left us some excellent examples of early water- 
colour art. But surely nothing he ever did was 
cleverer, or more characteristic of the place, than his 
scheme to enable the dilettanti of the City of Pleasure 
to learn to paint without study. 

Bath was London without its labour ; politics 
could be discussed without spending hours listening 
to debates at Westminster, and the affairs of the East 
India Company without sitting in an office in the 
dimness of the City. The place was permeated with 
a light atmosphere of an arduous pleasure more French 
than English; it was the only town in England 
where the first object of every one was to be amused. 
The moment that, in any society, large or small, it is 
admitted that to be a bore is the chief of offences, 
^ Cundall, "Historj^ of British Water Colour Painting," p. 32, 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 75 

that society becomes a social democracy. And so 
at Bath a wit was more appreciated than a peer. 

This special feature of the place was, for the first 
fifty years of the century, accentuated by the remark- 
able and unique influence of " Beau " Nash, who was 
to be the arbiter of society at Bath after the year 1702. 
He gained his sobriquet from his absurd display in 
dress ; but, in his social realm, princesses, peers, and 
boors, were lectured and snubbed by him with equal 
impartiality and rudeness. One day, having forbidden 
ladies to appear at assemblies in white aprons, the 
Duchess of Queensberry came wearing the obnoxious 
garment. Nash tore it off and threw it aside, saying 
that " such articles were suitable only for Abigails," 
and the Duchess promptly begged his pardon. He was 
not less severe with the incongruities of dress of the 
country squires who lived in their high boots and spurs. 
These gentlemen he ridiculed in a lampoon — Fon- 
tinella's " Invitation to the Assembly " — which ends 
with these lines : — 

" For why shouldn't we 
In dress be as free 
As Hog's Norton Squire in boots ? " ^ 

In a lively farce played by Nash's direction, 
Punch remarks, when he is going to bed in his 
boots, " Why, madam, you may as well bid me pull 
off my legs." 

The code of rules which Nash had framed and hung 

I Goldsmith, " Life of N^sh," p. 60. 



^e BEAU NASH 

in the Pump Room, in 1742, touched on polite manners 
rather than on becoming dress, but it was composed 
in the same strain of raillery, — as we should now 
think of impertinence — as thus : " That gentlemen 
crowding before the ladies at the ball show ill-manners, 
and that none do so for the future, except such as 
respect nobody but themselves." We are inclined to 
laugh at Nash's social despotism and at his impudence ; 
but a man who was nothing more than a mere brainless 
and jesting adventurer could not have exercised his 
social sway year after year — a sway which declined 
chiefly through old age ; he must have possessed some 
special qualities. Born in 1674, ^fter being sent down 
from the University of Oxford Nash became a student 
at the Temple, where he was notorious among his 
contemporaries for his frivolous and dissipated life. 
He went to Bath with the crowd of gamblers and idlers 
who found there opportunities for gaming and pleasure, 
with the purpose of getting his livelihood by gambling. 
Just at this time Dr. John Radcliife began to depreciate 
the medicinal value of the waters of Bath, and Nash 
determined to assist the city in a practical way. He 
saw that more might be done to make the place agree- 
able as well as healthy, and one of his first attempts 
with this object was to establish an orchestra. The 
story of his sudden rise is not clear, but probably he 
had already made himself personally popular. As 
amusement was the aim of most who came to the city, 
and as Nash was so opportunely bent on enlarging 
the means of agreeably passing the time, was so much 




Richard Nash, Esq. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 77 

awake to the need of improvement, whether hy new 
assembly rooms or better roads, he was, on the death of 
Captain Webster, appointed master of the ceremonies. 
This was probably about 1704, and the post gave an 
opening for his particular talents. Nash has been well 
described as " an agreeable and ingenious person of 
organizing capacity." He possessed tact, which 
enabled him to know how to treat individuals ; a 
knowledge of men, and decision of character. In 
truth, he was endowed with a special capacity for a 
peculiar position, one which to many would have been 
trivial, not to say ridiculous. He filled it with sufficient 
seriousness to make it appear, as indeed in some senses 
it was, positively important. 

It was well understood in Bath that Nash really 
desired to make the place pleasant to, and its amuse- 
ments obtainable by, every one, and so his subjects — 
being bent on pleasure — tacitly agreed to abide by 
his decisions and decrees. Dropping the character of 
a spendthrift, he became a social power. His position 
gave him influence and friends. " Beau " Nash was 
a success,^ and has even had the good fortune to have 
Goldsmith as a biographer and to live in the pages of 
this writer. One may smile, as Goldsmith says, " at 
the solemnity he assumed in adjusting trifles," though, 

^ Nash lived for the greater part of his time at Bath, in a house 
in St. John's Court designed by Thomas Greenway, which is now 
part of the theatre. He died in another house, where he had lived 
for about twelve years, a little to the north of his first home. Green's 
" Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath," p. 25, and plates xvii, 
and xviii. 



78 BEAU NASH 

after all, experience shows that it is often by the 
proper adjustment of trifles — especially in such a place 
as Bath — that peace between persons is preserved. 
But he had higher capacities than that of merely know- 
ing how to preserve the social peace, he was not with- 
out wit, of the use of which he was sparing his good 
nature and his kindliness were universally recognized, 
and his adaptability to all sorts and conditions of men 
is clear. It cannot, indeed, be doubted that he ob- 
tained an income from gambling ; it is probable, 
however, that his gains were made chiefly through 
confederates, and that to the outside world he was a 
mere amateur player like any one of it. " Here," 
wrote Lady Bristol to her husband, September 20, 
1 72 1, "is very deep play . . . Nash lost £^0 2l Satur- 
day at Harrison's " ; that is to say, at the Assembly 
Rooms. Lord Chesterfield wittily remarked, " I 
don't wonder at your losing money, Nash, but all the 
world is surprised where you get it to lose." 

About 1745? or perhaps earlier — there seems to be 
an uncertainty as to the exact date — Nash imprudently 
brought an action against Walter Wiltshire, a con- 
federate, to recover a share of the gains at Lindsay's 
Assembly Room. In 1740 an Act had been passed 
against public gambling, and in 1745 a still more strin- 
gent statute became law, under which Wiltshire 
himself was sued by the Vestry of St. Peter and St. 
Paul for keeping a gambling house and was fined ;£soo. 
A new generation had arisen, less inclined to submit 
to Nash's rule, and these proceedings were sufficient 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 79 

to bring the Master of the Ceremonies into a disrepute 
now not unwelcome to many visitors. 

The special position which Bath holds in English 
history is thus, partly, conterminous with the life of 
Nash. During this period Bath changed from an 
inconvenient watering-place, with small, badly con- 
structed, and often unhealthy houses, to the dignified 
city which now remains. Landor, who lived at Bath 
for many years, with the enthusiasm of a lover likened 
it to Florence. But the likeness only arises from 
configuration of ground, and in Bath we see typified 
in stone mainly the English eighteenth century with 
its sturdy common sense and serenity, while in the 
verdant and immediate surroundings are visible the 
attraction of the peaceful countryside, which helped 
not a little to draw to the city men and women 
from the larger world, and from the dust and din of 
London.-^ 

Bath was fortunate that, at the moment when her 
re-creation became urgent, a man singularly suited to 
carry out the work was at hand. Joseph Wood was 
a shrewd young Yorkshireman, born in 1704, and was 
probably introduced to Bath by Ralph Allen, the master- 
mind of the place. As an architect he had clear and 
definite ideas, and he aspired to create a fine and 
distinguished modern city in place of the cramped 
town which clustered round the Roman Baths and the 
mediaeval Abbey. By the end of the year 1725 he 
had formed a grandiose plan— -at the instance, it may 
^ Green, " The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath," p. 35. 



8o ARCHITECTURE 

be, of Allen, whose ideas were large and daring, as 
his career had shown — for the erection of various 
public buildings and dwelling-houses. There was to 
be " a grand place of assembly," to be called the 
" Royal Forum of Bath " ; another place, no less 
magnificent, for the exhibition of sports, to be named 
the "Grand Circus " — the original idea of the admir- 
able buildings known to many generations as the 
Circus. It was not, however, till the end of 1727 
that his ideas took definite shape, and that he agreed 
with Mr. Gay, a considerable landowner in Bath, to 
construct a new street. This was the beginning of a 
work which soon transformed the city. Wood was 
his own contractor — he was, in a sense, a speculative 
builder, who, unlike most of his kind, built not only 
for his contemporaries, but for posterity. He had 
imagination, courage, and technical capacity, and the 
invaluable support of a patron not less courageous, 
not less large in his ideas, actuated by civic virtue, 
and resolute in practical endeavour. The combina- 
tion was unusual, and the result was unexampled 
in the history of British architecture. Moreover, 
Wood had the good fortune to be followed by a son 
who carried out his father's designs, and was permeated 
by his father's architectural views. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the 
houses of Bath were old, dilapidated, and dirty; by 
the end of it the town had, by the work of one man — 
whose successor wisely followed the lines he had laid 
down — been transformed into a dignified, spacious, 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 8i 

and healthy city, so admirable in its form, and in 
its colouring, that it has retained its individuality 
through succeeding years. Queen's Square, the Circus 
— finished by the son in 1765, eleven years after Wood's 
death — the spacious parades, the Lower Rooms, v^ere 
Wood's own work.^ The more it is considered the 
more remarkable is seen to be the result achieved — 
the creation of a city substantial enough to long 
outlive its builders, consistent and harmonious in 
its parts, and so attaining an unusual architectural 
individuality. The Royal Crescent was both de- 
signed and completed (1771) by the younger Wood; 
his successor, Baldwin (i 750-1 820), was the designer 
of Pulteney Street and Laura Place. But chiefly from 
the mind of the elder Wood sprang the designs for 
the buildings of eighteenth-century Bath, the merit of 
which consists not only in the dignity of its individual 
streets and buildings, but also in the remarkable 
harmony which characterises the entire architecture 
of the modern town which arose during the reign 
of Nash. 

" The peculiar merit of the Woods in proposing 
and accomplishing this task was that they were 
architects and not mere builders ; that they had the 
beauty of the city they were transforming always 
before their eyes ; that they conceived and carried 
out a harmonious whole. Their ideal is no longer 
ours altogether ; the academic style is far from having 
retained the universal favour. . . . Rigorous criticism 
^ Green, " The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath," p. 119. 

6 



82 TRANSFORMATION OF THE TOWN 

will find their regularity a little cold sometimes, their 
solemnity a little heavy, their decoration somewhat 
poor, their invention somewhat circumscribed. But, 
granting all this, their conception remains original, 
dignified, and happy." ^ 

It may be added that the architect never lost 
sight of utility in a search for the picturesque, and 
that houses which were built in Bath in the eighteenth 
century were solid as well as handsome, comfortable 
to live in as well as agreeable to look at. 

A fortunate concurrence of circumstances — the 
advent of an architect of singularly bold views, 
the need for the enlargement of the town, and the 
existence of public-spirited and enlightened citizens 
— resulted in the creation of the new Bath. The old 
town was transformed into the unique city which 
has remained to us, and the change, contemporaneous 
as it was with the marked improvements in English 
roads which began after 1745, caused an influx of 
visitors far more numerous than would have come 
thither if drawn to Bath for purposes of health alone. 

It is not difficult even now to picture the place 
as it was in the days of Pitt, of Sheridan, and of 
Gainsborough, though the extending and somewhat 
mean suburbs have broken the well-defined lines of 
the ample town which lay on the right bank of the 
Avon enclosed in an opportune bend of the river, 
having as its centre the ruins of the Roman Bath 
and of the Gothic Abbey. And it is easy to realise 
1 Barbeau, " Life and Letters at Bath, " p. 285. 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 83 

how fair it must have seemed alike to the Londoner 
and the countryman. The dweller in the metropolis, 
fatigued by several days of disagreeable travel over 
muddy roads, alarmed by fears of highwaymen at 
each end of his journey— on Hounslow Heath or in 
secluded country lanes — ^vexed, made ill maybe, by 
forced stays at mean wayside inns, blown about by the 
winds of the Wiltshire Downs, arrived in a spacious 
and attractive city, where, if a well-known personage, 
he was welcomed by a peal from the bells of the Abbey. 
On one side lay the green slopes of Lansdown Hill ; on 
the other, above and below the town, the meadows 
of the valley of the Avon, hemmed in by the steep 
and wooded sides of Widecombe and of Beechen Cliff. 
Along the lower side of Walcot Street were a few 
dwelling-houses, behind them gardens and orchards 
fringed the river, while from the Royal Crescent to 
the point where Milk Street touched the Avon was 
an open and fruitful country. Below the end of the 
favourite promenade the North Parade, the Avon 
flowed peacefully, its willow-lined course unbroken 
by any bridge.^ Leaning on the balustrade which 
extended along the side of this pleasant walk, and 
looking up the valley, the most blase townsman could 
not but feel, even in those very material days, the 
charm of this varied and attractive landscape. 

The predominant features of the place were the 
classical style, the size, dignity, and orderliness of 

^ The North Parade Bridge was not built till 1836. Pulteney 
Bridge was built in 1769. 



84 THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL 

the buildings, and the varied yet quiet beauty of the 
country by which Bath was surrounded, and which was 
on all sides visible. The new arrival, were he from 
London, could not see anything similar from one 
end of England to "the other ; with much discomfort 
he could visit cathedrals standing amid mediaeval 
buildings, as at Chester or Winchester, but nowhere 
were material well-being and pleasure combined as 
at Bath, while the mere sight of the countryside, 
of the young sportsmen driving their teams on the 
London road, gave the feeling of country life without 
the discomforts of country living. The squire would 
note with no little surprise the fine streets and the 
substantial houses ; he would feel that he was at length 
in the world ; and while the rural scenes close at hand 
impressed the Londoner with the sense of change, they 
brought to the countryman the feeling of home. We 
may look around England in vain for any place which 
was comparable with Bath. 

It was certain that the frivolity and worldliness 
which characterised much of the society of Bath would 
make it a field for the propagation of the new Chris- 
tianity of which John Wesley and Whitefield were 
the chief apostles. To invade Bath was, as Charles 
Wesley said with spiritual relish, " attacking Satan 
at his headquarters." The stagnation and the for- 
malism of the Established Church produced the 
religious revival which resulted in the formation of 
the Methodist Church — a movement, as has been 
often pointed out, which was not in its inception 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 85 

antagonistic to the Church of England. But its 
emotional character made it distasteful to a society 
such as that of Bath, careful of conventional forms, 
and living, for the time at least, a life of pleasure. The 
feeling of the majority of those who stayed at Bath 
was expressed when the Duchess of Buckingham — in 
terms not too strongly marked with the sentiments 
of Christianity — wrote to Lady Huntingdon : 

" I thank your ladyship for the information con- 
cerning the Methodist preachers. Their doctrines 
are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with im- 
pertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in 
perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and do 
away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be 
told that you have a heart as sinful as the common 
wretches that crawl the earth. This is highly offen- 
sive and insulting, and I cannot but wonder that 
your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much 
at variance with high rank and good breeding." ^ 

The revolt against formalism in literature, and 
the increasing love of nature and of reality, were at 
work in Bath, but this fact did not make the labours 
of Wesley and Whitefield less objectionable to men 
and women who were still encompassed by limitations, 
although, unknown to themselves, they were endea- 
vouring to escape from them. 

When Wesley appeared at Bath, in 1739, he was 
naturally regarded as a nuisance by the larger part 
of the inhabitants who had come there, not to be 
1 " Life and Times of Lady Huntingdon," vol. i.^p. 27. 



86 WESLEY AND BEAU NASH 

converted from their sins, but to be cured of their 
bodily ailments, or for change of social and local 
scene. To none was Wesley more objectionable 
than to the amiable, sometimes learned, and rather 
idle ecclesiastical dignitaries who mixed among the 
secular throng in the Pump Room. 

Wesley himself tells how he came into conflict 
with Nash. It was a scene characteristic of the 
time. Wesley, indeed, on the Parade at Bath is as 
important a figure in the social picture of this age 
as is Savonarola preaching in the Duomo at Florence 
in that of the Italian Renaissance ; and its suggestive- 
ness, the way in which it throws into strong relief 
the opposing tendencies of the age, should not be 
overlooked. The third time that Wesley preached 
Nash appeared on the scene and demanded of him 
by what authority he did these things : 

" I replied, ' By the authority of Jesus Christ, 
conveyed to me by the (now) Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, when he laid his hands upon me and said, " Take 
thou authority to preach the Gospel." ' He said, 

* This is contrary to Act of Parliament. This is a 
Conventicle.' I answered, * Sir, the Conventicles 
mentioned in the Act (as the preamble shows) are 
seditious meetings. But this is not such. Here is 
no shadow of sedition. Therefore it is not contrary 
to the Act.' He replied, ' I say it is. But besides, 
your preaching frightens people out of their wits.' 

* Sir, did you ever hear me preach ? ' ' No.' ' How 
then can you judge of what you never heard ? ' 



THE CITY OF PLEASURE 87 

* Sir, by common report.' ' Common report is not 
enough. Give me leave, sir, to ask — is not your 
name Nash ? ' ^ My name is Nash.' ' Sir, I dare 
not judge of you by common report. I believe it 
is not enough to judge by.' Here he paused a while, 
and, having recovered himself, asked : * I desire to 
know what these people come here for ? ' On 
which one replied, * Sir, leave him to me^ Let an 
old woman answer him. You, Mr. Nash, take care 
of your body. We take care of our souls, and for 
the food of our souls we come here.' " ^ 

For the next thirty years Wesley constantly preached 
at Bath, where he attracted congregations very 
diverse in character. Walpole, in 1766, actuated by 
his usual curiosity, sat under him in Lady Hunting- 
don's Chapel, that odd little building with its external 
touches of feeble Gothic which still stands quaintly 
in the Vineyards. He found him "as evidently an 
actor as Garrick." Walpole, more from tempera- 
ment than opinion, disliked Wesley and his preaching. 
But his visit to Lady Huntingdon's Chapel, which 
she built in 1765, enabled him to leave a picture 
of a phase of the society of Bath in his time. 

" My health advances faster than my amusement. 
However, I have been at one opera — Mr. Wesley's. 
They have boys and girls with charming voices, that 
sing hymns, in parts, to Scotch ballad tunes ; but 
indeed so long that one would think they were already 
in eternity and knew how much time they had before 
* Wesley's "Journal," June 5, 1739. 



88 GAMING AND GRACE 

them. The chapel is very neat, with true Gothic 
windows (yet I am not converted) ; but I was glad 
to see that luxury is creeping in upon them before 
persecution ; they have very neat mahogany for 
branches, and brackets of the same in taste. At the 
upper end is a broad hautfas of four steps, advancing 
in the middle ; at each end of the broadest part are 
two of my eagles (a gift from Walpole to Lady Hunt- 
ingdon) with red cushions for the parson and clerk. 
Behind them rise three more steps, in the midst of 
which is a third eagle for pulpit — scarlet arm-chairs 
to all three. On either hand a balcony for elect ladies. 
The rest of the congregation sit on forms. Behind 
the pulpit, in a dark niche, is a plain table within rails ; 
so you see the throne is for the apostle. . . ." ^ 

Chapel, preacher, the mingling of the great and 
the lowly, form a striking picture, showing the 
influence of this memorable religious movement, the 
small dimensions of the canvas at Bath enabling us 
to realise it with great distinctness. The contrast 
did not escape either the eye or the pen of Anstey, 
and the lines in which he touched on it, though 
intended at the moment only to amuse, are essentially 
true : 

" Where Gaming and Grace 

Each other embrace, 
Dissipation and piety meet : — 

May all, who've a notion 

Of cards or devotion, 
Make Bath their delightful retreat." 

1 " Letters of Horace Walpole " (edited by Toynbee), vol. vii. p. 94 



CHAPTER VI 

The Literary Circle of the City of Pleasure 

Remarkable and suggestive as are the general features 
of social life at Bath between 1700 and 1800, indicative 
of movements that elsewhere in England were, though 
in existence, less perceptible, yet a special side of that 
same society forms an interesting phase in the per- 
sonal aspect of English literature. All over England 
are to be found places associated with some famous 
names, sometimes it is a town, sometimes a village ; 
Gray and Cambridge, Milton and Chalfont St. Giles, 
the Brontes and Haworth, are every day connected 
in our minds. But a diverse company of men engaged 
in literary pursuits spent week after week at Bath, 
thus uniting the town not with a single personality, 
but with many, so that Bath becomes in an un- 
paralleled degree a part of the literary life of the 
eighteenth century. 

It was chiefly through Ralph Allen ^ that, early 
in the century, Bath became closely linked with the 
history of English letters, for he was the constant and 
intimate friend of Pope, of Fielding, and of War- 
burton. Pope does not seem to have made Allen's 

^ Peach, " Life and Times of Ralph Allen," pp. 45 a seq. 
89 



90 RALPH ALLEN 

acquaintance till about 1726,^ though before that 
time he had paid many visits to Bath for the benefit 
of his health. Allen's was a remarkable and attractive 
character, typical of the energetic men who were 
less numerous and noticeable in the South than in 
the North of England, where, in the same period, 
Arkwright and Boulton and Wedgwood were leaders 
in the industrial revolution. The son of a small 
innkeeper in Cornwall, Allen entered the post-office 
at Bath at the age of eighteen and his official zeal 
caused him to be appointed postmaster when quite a 
young man. It is instructive, as showing the changes 
which modern demands were now creating, to note 
that the means whereby Allen attained to wealth 
were improvements in postal communication. His 
project was to establish cross-country means of 
communication in addition to the north and south 
lines, which were then the main postal routes. In 
1720, being then six-and-twenty, Allen was granted 
a concession to work the cross-road and the byway 
letter service in England and Wales for the term of 
seven years, for which he had to pay the Government 
an annual rent of ^2,000 a year. The success of 
the enterprise was assured after three doubtful years, 

1 M. Barbeau says 1732, and ascribes the acquaintance to Allen's 
admiration for Pope's letters — following Warburton. But the first 
volume of these letters was published in 1726. It is improbable 
that Allen should not have known Pope slightly from the time of his 
first visits. 

See also Elwin and Courthope's "Life and Letters of Pope," 
vol. ix. p. 188. 




Henry Fielding. 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 91 

and the concession was renewed from time to time 
at increased rentals, Allen meanwhile securing profits 
which have been put down at from ^10,000 to ^16,000 
a year. He was a man of a broad, kindly, and generous 
disposition, of great sagacity, discretion, and power, 
one who, in a larger sphere, might have secured a 
place as a statesman ; of Bath he was the most con- 
spicuous civil figure, the controller of its municipal 
affairs. His character, and to some extent his large 
and bold ideas, are shown by the house which he 
built about two miles from the town. 

Prior Park was erected between 1735 and 1737, but 
in its entirety, its out-buildings, and its gardens, it 
was not finished till 1743. This fine mansion, with 
its columned portico, and its extended colonnades 
and wings, still dominates to-day, as it did a century 
and a half ago, the wooded and narrowing glades of 
Widcombe valley descending towards the Avon from 
the topmost slopes of the coombe. Though some 
distance from Bath, Prior Park is connected with the 
town by the style of its architecture, and is closely 
associated with the social and literary history of the 
city. It reminds us strikingly of the movements of the 
age, for this house — almost a palace — was not built 
as Castle Howard or Harewood House, to the order 
of a territorial magnate of long lineage, but to that 
of one of the middle class, one of the moneyed men 
who were now coming to the front in English life. 

In 1728 Gay and Arbuthnot were with Allen, thus 
linking the age of Anne with that of the Georges, 



92 POPE IN THE CITY OF PLEASURE 

and leaving in the Western city memories of the 
Scriblerus Club, and of the famous literary and 
political coteries associated with the society of the 
Court of Anne. In 1734 Pope was at Bath with 
Bolingbroke, and it is easy to see that Bath was only 
made bearable to the poet by the pleasant company 
of those around him ; sometimes he was there for 
two months, sometimes for three, but he was not 
always complimentary to the place ; " to prefer 
rocks and dirt to flowery meads and lovely Thames, 
and limestone and fogs to roses and sunshine. When 
I arrive at these sensations I may settle at Bath, of 
which I never dreamt, further than to live just out 
of the sulphurous pit, and at the edge of the fogs at 
Mr. Allen's for a month or so. I like the place so 
little that health itself could not drag me thither, 
though friendship has twice or thrice." Allen had 
an unquestionable admiration for Pope which flattered 
his vanity and likewise increased the material com- 
forts of his visit. " He (Allen) has come a hundred 
miles to fetch me." In his own way Pope repaid 
Allen's kindness and liberality with affection and 
regard, which are expressed in his letter to Warburton, 
in 1 74 1, a letter which gives us a picture not only 
of his host at Prior Park, but of the place : 

" I am here," he says, " in more leisure than I 
can possibly ever enjoy in my own house, vacare 
Uteris. It is at this place, that your exhortations may 
be most effectual to make me resume the studies 
I have almost laid aside, by perpetual avocations and 




Alexander Pope. 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 93 

dissipations. If it were practicable for you to pass 
a month or six weeks from home, it is here I could 
wish to be with you : and if you would attend to 
the continuation of your own noble work, or unbend 
to the idle amusement of commenting upon a poet 
who has no other merit than that of aiming by his 
moral strokes to merit some regard from such men as 
advance truth and virtue in a more effectual way ; 
in either case, this place and this house would be 
an inviolable asylum to you, from all you would 
desire to avoid in so public a place as Bath. The 
worthy man who is the master of it invites you in 
the strongest terms ; and is one who would treat you 
with love and veneration rather than what the world 
calls civility and regard. He is sincere and plainer 
than almost any man in this world, antiquis moribus. 
If the waters of Bath may be serviceable to your com- 
plaints (as I believe from what you have told me of 
them), no opportunity can ever be better. We are 
told the Bishop of Salisbury is expected here daily, who 
I know is your friend, at least, though a bishop, is too 
much a man of learning to be your enemy. You see I 
omit nothing to add to the weight in the balance, in 
which, however, I will not think myself light, since I 
have known your partiality. You will want no servant 
here. Your room will be next to mine, and one man 
will serve us. Here is a library and a gallery 90 feet 
long to walk in, and a coach whenever you would take 
the air with me. ... Is all this a dream or can you 
make it a reality ? Can you give ear to me ? 



94 POPE AND ALLEN 

Audistin^ F an me ludit amabilis 
Insania F " ^ 

Po pe's peevish a nd hypQchondriacal nature caused 
him to break off this admirable friendship a 
few months before his death, through some petty 
quarrel between Mrs. Allen and Pope's constant 
friend and companion, Martha Blount, whose " in- 
decent arrogance," as Johnson called it, was not 
calculated to make things pleasant for her hostess. 
Pope at any rate departed from Prior Park in a pet 
he wrote to Martha Blount (1743) that he would 
never set foot in Allen's house again, and he called 
Warburton a " sneaking parson " for upholding Mrs. 
Allen. Allen was too sensible and too kindly to 
allow this foolish quarrel to become a permanent 
estrangement, and in March of the next year he 
called on Pope and tried to renew the broken friend- 
ship. But he was evidently unsuccessful. " I 
thought," wrote Pope, " his behaviour a little shy ; 
but in mine I did my very best to show I was quite 
unconcerned what it was. He departed, inviting 
himself to come again on his return in about a fort- 
night." These words have no sound either of cor- 
diality or of renewed affection, and in a few weeks 
Pope was dead. Allen, who lived till 1764, is com- 
memorated in Pope's verse, and one couplet has 
become proverbial : 

" Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame, 
Do good hy stealth and blush to find it fame." 

1 Pope's " Works " (edited by Elwin & Courthope), vol. ix. p. 220 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 95 

The friendship of Fielding and Allen was simpler 
and more manly. Fielding, in the middle of the 
century, was living at the village of Twerton, in a 
valley some two miles from Prior Park, and he con- 
stantly visited the great house, while his sister Sarah 
had a cottage at Widcombe, the village of which 
Prior Park was the mansion. Allen allowed her 
j^ioo a year, and it was, perhaps, through this friend- 
ship that Fielding himself became acquainted with 
the able and kind-hearted man.^ 

Allen was as generous to Fielding as to his sister, 
and the honest and straightforward way in which 
Fielding showed his gratitude remains for all time in 
his portrait of Squire Allworthy, though the picture 
does not do justice to Allen's considerable capacity 
as a man of business and affairs. This side of his 
character Fielding would have but few opportuni- 
ties of observing, so that his agreeable and generous 
portrait is, after all, only a half-truth. But whilst 
for the moment we meet all these notable men at 
Prior Park, we must not forget that we are in the 
environs of Bath, that if they spent part of their 
days at Allen's stately mansion with its beautiful and 
commanding outlook over the narrow and wooded 
Widcombe Valley, they were constantly in Bath, and 
that it is around the city that these associations 
cluster. 

It is near the end of the century, when the drama 
of which Sheridan and Miss Linley were the hero 
1 "Life and Times of Ralph Allen," p. 133. 



96 SHERIDAN AND ELIZABETH LINLEY 

and heroine was enacted at Bath, one full of personal 
interest, and illustrative of contemporary life and 
manners there. It is a long story,^ which cannot here 
be told in its entirety. Sheridan, whose father had 
come to Bath, in 1770, to teach elocution, was young, 
impetuous, idle, enjoying to the full the elements of 
comedy which he saw around him, when he fell in 
love with beautiful Elizabeth Linley, whose father 
was the conductor of the concerts. Child as she 
was, she had already several suitors, among them 
Sheridan's elder brother Charles, his friend Halhed 
— who subsequently made both a reputation and a 
fortune in the service of the East India Company — 
and a rich sexagenarian of the name of Long, to 
whom, in 1771, she was actually, through parental 
pressure, on the point of being married. 

Society at Bath, much engrossed in personal affairs, 
could not bear the idea of so unequal a marriage, and 
Foote voiced its opinion when he wrote his play, 
^he Maid of Bath, which appeared at the Hay- 
market Theatre on June 26, 1771. In it Miss 
Linley figures under the name of Miss Linnett, and 
her elderly lover as the fool, knave, and miser, Flint, 
an unfair caricature of a man whose only drawback 
was his age. The gist of the play is contained in 
the denouement, when the engagement is suddenly 
broken off, and Miss Linnett exclaims, " I beg to 
remain in the station I am in : my little talents have 
hitherto received the public protection, nor, whilst 
^ Sichel, "Life of Sheridan," vol. i. pp. ^iS et seq. 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 97 

I continue to deserve, am I the least afraid of losing 
my patrons." The end of the engagement came, 
in fact, in much the same fashion. Miss Linley 
loved Richard Sheridan, and, more sensible than 
her parents, v^rote to Long, asking him to break 
.off the engagement. To this request he at once 
agreed, and quixotically settled ^3,000 on the young 
lady, presenting her also with valuable jewels. 

Miss Linley, again, was being tormented by a certain 
Don Juan of Bath, a Major Mathews, the original 
of Major Rackett in Foote's play — who did not trouble 
to disguise the source of this particular character 
— and to escape from him she took the odd resolve 
of flying to a convent at St. Quentin. This plan was 
confided to Sheridan and his sister and, one evening 
in March of 1772, in company with a female travelling 
companion and her lover, Miss Linley set off from 
Bath, leaving both her father and sister Mary safe at a 
concert. Such a hasty flight, honestly meant as it 
was, might have ended in some scandal, had not the 
protecting youth and the helpless girl come to the 
conclusion that marriage was the best way out 
of the difficulty. So Richard Sheridan, aged 
twenty-one, and Elizabeth Linley, aged nineteen, were 
clandestinely wedded at a village near Calais. This 
secret union, however, by no means ended the 
drama. Mrs. Sheridan retired to a convent at 
Lille, and then to the care of an English family in 
the same town, whence she was brought back by her 
father to England. 

7 



98 SHERlDAN^S DUELS 

Meanwhile Mathews, at Bath, was writing angry- 
letters to Sheridan — whose brother was equally wrath- 
ful at Miss Linley's flight — and he finally inserted 
in ^he Bath Chronicle a notice that Sheridan was 
not a gentleman, and also a challenge. The moment 
Sheridan — still in France — received the letters he 
hurried back, found Mathews in London, and ob- 
tained from his opponent an explanation which 
appeased his anger. But on arriving at Bath he 
purchased a copy of the Chronicle and, hastily re- 
turning to London, fought a duel with Mathews 
in a tavern, a rough-and-tumble kind of fight, which 
produced an apology from his rival. Mathews re- 
tired to Wales, but presently came back to Bath, where 
he gave his own version of the duel. A second 
encounter, on July 2, on Kingsdown Hill, was the 
result. 

It was not at this moment the season at Bath, and 
Miss Linley, as she still was to the world, was singing 
at a concert at Oxford. On her way home she heard 
of Sheridan's wound, and insisted on seeing him, saying 
she was his wife. But her words were not taken 
seriously. Sheridan himself made no avowal of 
the marriage ; on the contrary, he actually promised 
his father that he would never marry Miss Linley, 
and was sent off by him to Waltham Abbey, where 
he remained till the following spring. Miss Linley 
departed for Tunbridge Wells. All kinds of inter- 
mediate difficulties, sorrows, estrangements, and con- 
cealments followed, until Mr. Linley relented, and on 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 99 

April 13, 1773, Sheridan and Miss Linley, as we 
still may call her, were remarried in London. 

It is a curious story, valuable as a graphic illus- 
tration of people and of life at Bath. All sorts and 
conditions of persons were mixed up in it. Bath 
society was in a state of excitement over this 
adventure of two young and interesting people, and 
the affair was important enough to be sent as a piece 
of news from Bath to ^he London Chronicle^ wherein 
it is thus reported : " Bath, March 23, Wednesday. — 
The eldest Miss Linley, of this city, justly cele- 
brated for her musical abilities, set off with Mr. 
Sheridan, junior, on a matrimonial expedition to 
Scotland." 

Some time after the Sheridan romance — in 1780 — 
Fanny Burney made her memorable visit to Bath. 
It was two years after the publication of " Evelina," 
by which she had become a celebrity. She arrived 
under the escort and as the guest of Mrs. Thrale, who, 
wealthy, clever, and respectable, represented an im- 
portant section of the women who delighted in Bath. 
Mrs. Thrale had been a visitor before, in 1776, and 
much of the remainder of her life was passed in Bath ; 
there also, in 1784, her marriage to Piozzi took place. 
Thenceforth she was a frequent resident, until, after 
her second husband's death in 1809, she settled there 
till the end of her life in 1821 — thus, the intimate 
friend of Johnson, and the hostess of Burke, uniting 
the eighteenth century, and Bath in particular, with 
a later epoch. 



loo PARTIES AT BATH EASTON 

Fanny Burner's quick intelligence and her power 
of accurate description enabled her to depict with 
easy gaiety and simple truth the character of life at 
Bath. Her pleasure in bright talk, and her instant 
perception alike of wit and of stupidity, enabled her 
to bring into relief many features of society at Bath — 
its good as well as its bad points — for beneath all 
its frivolity was a stratum of intellectual life. A faint 
imitation of the salons of Madame du Deifand and 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was noticeable in some 
of the parties at Bath. But the English character is 
not suited to the enjoyment of a society at once intel- 
lectual and worldly ; philosophy and gossip do not 
amalgamate on this side of the Channel, and the 
reunions at Bath Easton, where Lady Miller received 
guests in her pleasant villa, and where poetical com- 
positions dropped into a classical urn were read, 
and prizes awarded, after the example of Madame 
d'Houdetot at Sannois, amidst the chatter of a garden- 
party, brought the intellectual side of Bath society 
into some ridicule. " He was a blockhead for his 
pains," said Johnson, in his blunt way, of a gentle- 
man who attended these parties. Yet, in spite 
of their exaggerations and affectations, they were 
harmless enough, and these gatherings must in some 
respects have been pleasant. In imagination we may 
reconstruct the scene, for we can still see the house 
with its classical ornamentation and the pillars of the 
grottoes, and the smooth lawns sloping to the high 
road from Bath. Here — 




Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH loi 

"Lady Miller once a fortnight gave out a subject 
for poetical composition, on which, when the com- 
pany was assembled, those whom the Muses, or 
perhaps vanity, or the love of fame, had influenced, 
produced their performances, and put them into an 
elegant antique marble vase brought from Rome, 
and placed on a pedestal in the bow window ; when 
the company were seated, some young nymph put 
in her delicate arm and took out a single poem, which 
the author, or some one who either had, or fancied 
he had, an agreeable elocution, read to the assembly. 
When in this manner the whole collection was gone 
through, the gentlemen retired into a contiguous 
apartment, where, amidst a profusion of jellies, 
sweetmeats, ice-creams and the like, they decided 
on the merits of the several performances, from which 
they selected three, which were deemed the best, 
and of course entitled to prizes, which her ladyship 
distributed to the respective authors ; a pompous 
bouquet of flowers to the first, a myrtle wreath to 
the second, and a sprig of myrtle to the third. These 
were then usually presented by the successful candidate 
to some lady, who wore them in her hair or her 
bosom the next evening to the publick rooms." ^ 

We may smile at these proceedings, but they 
brought many people to Bath,^ and they indicate 

1 Graves, " The Triflers," p. ii. 

2 " I counted one morning above fifty carriages drawn up in line 
from Bath Easton, and was at one time present at it, with four 
Duchesses " (Graves, " The Triflers, " p. 13). 



102 MISS BURNEY AT BATH 

better than any description can do, the growth of 
gentler manners in certain sections of English society, 
the desire for recreation other than the sport and 
the boisterous evenings of Squire Western and the 
cards which then formed the chief indoor amuse- 
ment all over the country. 

During the pleasant season of late spring and 
early summer, of April, May, and June, when Bath 
and the fertile valley of the Avon were at their best, 
Fanny Burney was also at her best, ingenuously 
delighting in her own success and recording in her 
diary, with a quite delightful naivete, the remarks, 
often ridiculous, fulsome, and exaggerated, which 
were made to her on a book which was in the hands 
and the mouth of every one. The incidents of her 
day were trivial; no one went to Bath to lead a 
strenuous life. With Miss Burney it was breakfast 
at home with Mrs. Thrale or with a friend, a stroll in 
the meadows, perhaps ; after a two o'clock dinner at 
another house, a concert, or a walk to the Belvedere, 
or an evening party at which cards and tea were 
mingled with talk, as depicted in Hogarth's "Assembly 
at Wanstead House " (1728). Sometimes there was a 
call to be made, for evening visits were much in 
vogue, or else a theatre : " We all went to the play 
to see an actress, she (Miss Bowdler) is strangely 
fond of Mrs. Siddons in ' Belvidere.' " But, instead 
of admiring her, they all fell in love with a second- 
rate actor. Theatre or party, or whatever was the 
occupation of the evening, it was sure to be a 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 103 

pleasant ending to a day which, if its occurrences 
were uneventful, was from morning to night sociable 
and bright, and was more like a fete-champ^tre 
hy Watteau than a landscape by Gainsborough. 

Miss Burney moved among " tonish " ladies, among 
the " witlings " ; she tells of a t8te-a-tete now with 
a bishop, now with a clever young peer, and now 
with one of those naval officers who were then the 
heroes of the day, and of whom I shall speak on a 
later page. She was one of the celebrities in a con- 
stantly moving crowd, in a society well-to-do, a little 
clerical, and for the most part middle class, in which 
wealth, wit, and respectability were amusingly united, 
and she describes, with admirable vivacity and truth, 
the society of Bath towards the end of the century, 
indicating not only the cosmopolitanism of the 
place, but the mental atmosphere and the current 
ideas of an interesting portion of the English people. 
We see before us the varied throng — politicians and 
capitalists, artists and actors, divines and sailors, 
women of wit from town, and hoydens from the 
countryside. All mingled freely, and without social 
restraint, not in the least aware that they exemplified 
drastic national changes, and deep social evolutions 
in silent progress. 

" Society in the eighteenth century," it has been 
well said, " in spite of the very rigorous and active 
controversies upon the questions which divided it, 
was in the main self-satisfied, complacent, and com- 
fortable," and nowhere mpr^ so than at Bath, where 



104 SOCIETY AT END OF THE CENTURY 

the tendencies of the century were focused. We 
note also the vigorous exercise of English art, the art 
of Gainsborough and Lawrence, of portraiture and 
landscape, fostered by a society which was beginning 
to appreciate the gifts of the painter — who had in 
the past been generally a foreigner, and whose patrons 
had seldom been other than royal or noble. Now 
the great middle-class were becoming amateurs, and 
the purchaser of a picture was of the same grade that 
across the North Sea had sustained the Dutch artists 
of an earlier age. All these features Fanny Burney's 
diary reveals to us, and it is for this reason that her 
depiction of Bath has so permanent a value. 

Of the last phase of the literary society of Bath 
Miss Austen is the central and attractive figure. She 
describes the city as it passes from the eighteenth 
to the nineteenth century — from that marked inter- 
vening epoch between the old age and the modern, 
between England of the Stuarts and of the Revolu- 
tion, to England as it now is. Miss Austen unites Bath 
in its zenith to Bath in its decline. She lived there 
from 1801 to 1805, and in " Northanger Abbey" 
and in " Persuasion " are narrated the sayings and 
doings of Bath just before it descended into a common- 
place spa, losing its distinctive features from causes 
to which I have already referred. Miss Austen's 
Bath is made agreeable by her own personal charm, 
and by the delicacy of her art. " She saw nothing 
worse around her than a good deal of frivolity, a 
little dissipation, and a touch of vulgarity " — faults of 



THE LITERARY CIRCLE OF BATH 105 

the surface only, fit not for condemnation but for the 
gentle ridicule which, while it criticises, does not 
wound, and which recognises that there may be sins 
of manners and of taste compatible with sterling 
worth. 

In Miss Austen's day Bath, though declining, had 
unquestionably become more refined, its tone had 
improved, and decency was more regarded. Young 
Thorpe, for instance, though with manners between 
those of a lout and a groom, was many degrees better 
than the brutal young fox-hunting squire — a youthful 
squire Western, brother of the charming Narcissa,whom 
Smollett describes. What remarkable products of 
the age were these damsels of seventeen, who blushed 
with downcast eyes when their lovers spoke, and 
yet heard without a change of colour the grossest 
conversation. Bath presented then, as it had before, 
examples of certain phases of national character 
outside and beyond its bounds. But Miss Austen 
possessed to so great a degree the story-telling power 
that we are apt to lose touch with the locality in the 
interest of the novel. She had no moral to point 
as had Richardson and Fielding, her object was to 
please, and it is for our present purpose the chief 
interest of Miss Austen's connection with Bath, that she 
places two of her stories there which, like her other 
works, are examples of the uprising of the modern 
novel. 

One thus quits the literary circle of Bath in her 
agreeable company. The last phase of its historical 



io6 ENGLAND'S ONLY CITY OF PLEASURE 

importance is engraved for posterity on her charming 
pages, which will ever recall that remarkable society, 
so varied, and so gay, which was once concentrated 
in Bath, the only City of Pleasure that England has 
ever seen — the peculiar product and possession of the 
eighteenth century. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Seaport 

We have come to the third and last of the three 
pre-eminent cities of England in the eighteenth 
century — a city which may emphatically and truly 
be called The Seaport. No town could differ more 
from Bath than Liverpool, wherein men's minds and 
lives were concentrated with strict and purposeful 
energy on the daily pursuit of success in maritime 
commerce and adventure. Adventurers indeed, in 
one form or another, personal or financial, most of 
the inhabitants of Liverpool were — the spirit of 
adventure permeated the town. It is true that 
London was also a port, and veritably an important 
port, but — and this makes all the difference — far more 
than a seaport. The ships which sought London 
pushed their slow way up the devious course of the 
Thames until they reached the narrow anchorage 
below old London Bridge. But the craft which 
were moored here had long left the sea behind. 
They lay to their anchors, picturesque additions to 
an animated scene, adding to the business of a capital 
occupied with almost every interest under the sun. 
But ships, crews, and cargoes formed only some 

107 



io8 THE REPRESENTATIVE SEAPORT 

elements of a marvellous and miscellaneous activity, 
and the sailors who v^andered from the river bank 
were soon lost in a varied crowd. London as a port 
was in fact merged in London as a capital. Bristol 
— a larger town then than Liverpool — also was a 
port, and at Bristol seamen and shipowners were 
less swamped than in London by a throng of men 
of differing occupations. Bristol, however, lay ten 
miles up a narrow and tortuous stream, and was 
the chief town of a rich valley of the West, its position 
in a fruitful agricultural district giving it a distinctly 
inland atmosphere. Of its inhabitants only a part — 
though a large one — was concerned with the sea ; 
its interests were in fact numerous. Yet London and 
Bristol only were at all comparable with Liverpool 
as ports ; elsewhere, as at Newcastle and Chester, 
ships arrived and departed, but this commerce was 
trifling in comparison with that of Liverpool. 

It had long been the obvious destiny of Liverpool 
to become the representative seaport of England^ — a 
destiny which from the thirteenth century had slowly, 
and with fluctuating fortunes, been evolved, until, in 
the eighteenth century, the town definitely and finally 
attained the noteworthy position of the chief seaport 
of the kingdom. 

From the beginning of its history Liverpool, 
by reason of its geographical situation, had been 
singularly isolated from the rest of England ; it had 
been content with its maritime highway, and it had 
not troubled to come into closer touch with the 



THE SEAPORT 109 

inland portions of the kingdom. For it the sea was 
no divider. As the French Canadian habitant of 
to-day, who dwells in the white villages which nestle 
under the solitary and impassable hills which border 
the St. Lawrence, looks on that majestic stream not 
as an immense barrier, but only as connecting him 
with his distant countrymen, so the people of Liver- 
pool regarded the Mersey and the waters beyond it. 
To them their outlet was the river, not the miry 
and impassable tracks which led from Liverpool 
across the bleakest of countrysides to the towns 
beyond. The proud words which surmount the 
entrance to the office of a famous shipping company 
on the Alsterdam at Hamburg might with good reason 
have been used by the merchants of the Mersey. " The 
world is my field," would aptly have summarized the 
aims and the ambitions of the people of Liverpool. 
Its particular character as a remote seaport,^ 

1 The isolation of Liverpool may be exemplified by the fact that 
in 1775 there was only one letter-carrier for the whole town, 
that in 1753 the only means of communication with London was 
by stage wagons, the quickest of which took ten days on the journey. 
Gentlemen travelled on horseback, ladies in carriages. In 1760 the 
first stage coach to London was advertised ; one — euphoniously known 
as the London and Liverpool Flying Machine — made the journey 
in forty-eight hours. In 1784 mail coaches were started, the 
journey occupying from thirty to forty-eight hours, but at first they 
carried only four passengers beside the guard and coachman, each 
of whom was armed with a blunderbuss. It was not until 1760 that 
the high road from Liverpool to Warrington was made practicable 
for carriages. Goods were chiefly conveyed by sea between Liver- 
pool, London, and other English ports by regular traders, which 
also carried a few passengers. 



no EFFECTS OF ISOLATION OF LIVERPOOL 

which still existed in the eighteenth century, had 
kept Liverpool free from many political troubles, 
it had given independence and self-reliance to its 
citizens and its sailors, but it had made it less sensitive 
to the larger movements of the age. No English 
community of the eighteenth century was so little 
responsive to the new feelings and aspirations of the 
times — the desire for intellectual freedom, for higher 
standards of social and municipal life — or so little 
conscious of the growing unrest of general European 
society. 

In the middle of the century, however, Liverpool 
began to lose something of the isolation, of which 
I have already spoken, commercially at least if 
not socially. It now came into more frequent and 
closer contact with the inland districts, with the 
rising manufacturing towns of Lancashire and York- 
shire, with the factories of the Midlands, the salt 
mines of Cheshire and the pastures of Shropshire, 
by a network of canals — waterways extending like 
a fan from the commercial city on the estuary 
of the Mersey, whence the products of the inland 
parts of England were carried by sailing ships to all 
parts of the world near and far. Here, on a 
great arm of the sea, the town was in constant con- 
tact with the ocean, whose moods were reflected day 
by day on the surface of the tides as they flowed 
and ebbed by the piers and landing-places of the 
town. The waves, the fog, the shimmer on the waters 
of the estuary, the moist gales from the Atlantic, 



THE SEAPORT in 

all told of the sea. In front, the West Indiaman and 
the coaster lay swinging to their anchors, with furled 
sails, whilst, with a Western wind, the merchantman 
and the privateer with well-filled canvas broke the 
wave-touched horizon. Nowhere in the town, or in 
its proximity, was the sense of the sea, and the per- 
ception of the traffic of the sea, absent. It entered 
into every part of the daily life of the people. The 
bleak marshes — now covered by docks or dwellings — 
which spread northwards towards the coast^ were 
swept by sea winds, were the adjuncts of the estuary, 
and the city itself did not differ in general character 
from the town which stood on the banks of the 
Mersey in the Middle Ages. It had increased in 
size, but it had still all the characteristics of the 
primitive seaport, of a purely waterside town, for 
the streets extended only a short distance from the 
Mersey, and were never out of sight of the tideway. 
Narrow and irregular, badly built, with mean and 
dirty courts behind them, constructed of a dingy 
brick, which gave a peculiarly sombre colouring to 
the town, they mostly led towards the waterside ; to 
the shipyards — for many fine ships and frigates were 
constructed here — to the strand^ with the coasters 
lying aground and the small boats hauled up, to the 
ferries, and to the fishermen's nets drying in the 
sun. In these streets, offices, private residences, and 
shops were intermingled. 

The merchant was a homely and a simple man, 
unostentatious and careful, and if he emulated the 



112 THE CENTRE OF THE SEAPORT 

Venetian as a trader he made no attempt to vie with 
him as a patron of art. He had few pleasures, little 
ambition beyond his business, and small occupation 
outside his counting-house ; but this extreme absorp- 
tion in commerce was one cause of his commercial 
success. It was quite in accordance with this order 
of things that the merchant should dwell over, or hard 
by, his place of business, and his wife bought her 
dresses in the same street in which her husband 
daily conducted his affairs. Not till towards the 
end of the century did the merchant begin to live 
at a distance from his work, and in the rural out- 
skirts of the city. A miscellaneous crowd of 
persons and vehicles filled the thoroughfares — men, 
women and children, carts, carriages and coaches. 
After 1760, one might have watched the London 
coach starting from the Golden Talbot in Water 
Street, and turning, have perceived the canvas and 
the crowded deck of a privateer sailing down the 
river. Passing wagons heaped with merchandise 
toiled up and down the badly paved street from the 
wharves, and from the higher land outside the city 
the course of the Mersey and the sea in the distance 
were visible, dominating the landscape. 

In their pleasures the people of the town were often 
brought in contact with the sea, even race-meetings 
were held on the smooth, sandy surface of Crosby 
Marsh, on one side of which was the open sea, " which,'' 
writes an enthusiastic local chronicler — describing a 
meeting in the summer of 1774 — " was covered with 



THE SEAPORT 113 

sails, sloops, wherries, and boats loaded with pas- 
sengers discharged at the fbot of the race ground ; to 
the east were the villages and the Leeds Canal, with 
sloops and boats and colours flying." * When the 
sons and daughters of the merchants went to dances 
or card-parties, the Exchange was the rendezvous. 
Derrick, Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, the 
successor of Beau Nash, visited Liverpool in 1760, 
and he described to a correspondent,^ among the 
other sights of the place, the Exchange — the centre 
of the life of the town. This building had an especial 
interest for Derrick, for it had been designed by the 
elder and the younger Wood, the architects of Bath. 
He tells of the fine apartments in the upper part of the 
building, wherein the Corporation transacted public 
business, and continues, " the assembly room, which 
is also upstairs, is grand, spacious, and finely illumin- 
ated : here is a meeting once a fortnight to dance and 
play cards." It was in a room above this very apart- 
ment that, in the daytime, the men of the gathering 
had made charter parties, and settled maritime losses 
on policies of insurance. The dinner-table told the 
same tale. Rum, flavoured with limes from the 
West Indies, brought in the host's ship, was a 
favourite drink; the board was plentifully supplied 
with fresh sea fish, taken by men who dried their 
nets on the adjacent strand, and you were often 
reminded of the prosperous slave trade by the presence 

* Williamson's Liverpool AdvertiseTy July 5, 1774. 
2 Baines, " History of Liverpool," 426. 

8 



114 THE SLAVE TRADE 

of a negro butler, who had perhaps been imported 
with other tropical produce, or purchased at auction 
in the town.^ 

It was to the African trade of which this black 
man reminds us that Liverpool owed much pre- 
eminence as a port during the last half of the century. 
Admitted to the slave trade in 1730, she soon dis- 
tanced her two competitors, London and Bristol.^ 
Success in all maritime affairs was unquestionably 
due to the superior capacity of the merchants of 
Liverpool as men of business, and of its captains as 
seamen. Each possessed inherited qualities which, 
in the course of years, had become more and more 
perfected, forming a common and remarkable heritage 
of the people of the town. 

/ As the century advanced, the African ventures of 
the Liverpool merchant became still more remunera- 
tive and the prosperity of the town apparently 
further bound up with that of the trade. Liver- 
pool ships sailed from the Mersey to the African 
coast, where negroes were purchased either by a 
system of barter or for cash, the average cost of a 

^ Slaves were sold in Liverpool until 1772, when it was held that 
a slave became a free man when he touched English soil. In Wil- 
liamson's Advertiser for September 12, 1766, is the following adver- 
tisement : " To be sold at the Exchange Coffee House, in Water 
Street, this day, the 12th instant, September, at I o'clock precisely, 
eleven negroes imported by the Angola. . . ." 

2 From 1783-1793, 878 Liverpool ships carried from Africa to 
the West Indies, 303,737 slaves. In the decade, 1795-1804, London 
ships carried 46,405 slaves, Bristol ships 10,718, and Liverpool ships 
323,777. 



THE SEAPORT 115 

slave being twenty-five pounds. The vessel, her 
cargo obtained, set out for the West Indies, where 
this living freight on an average fetched fifty pounds 
per head, and finally the ship completed the third 
stage of the round voyage by returning to Liverpool 
laden with the produce of Jamaica or of the Bar- 
badoes. 

Half apprehensive * and half ashamed, keenly alive 
to the profits of the trade, desperately afraid of being 
ruined if they were lost, Liverpool presently relin- 
quished a merely defensive attitude, and towards the 
end of the century — from i/SO' — showed an active and 
determined opposition to the increasing national 
feeling against the slave trade. This traffic — 
said a petition of the Corporation in 1788 — " had 
lately been unjustly reprobated as impolitic and 
inhuman." The merchant, sitting in his counting- 
house, did not personally witness the cruelties and 
sufferings attendant on this trade in human beings, 
but he was not unaware of them. Such indifference 
to human suffering prolonged an indifference to cruelty 
and suffering of all kinds at home, a state of mind not 

^ Free trade, or, in other words, non-interference with the slave 
trade, was the watchword, the merit of which was claimed by both 
political parties. Picton's "Memorials of Liverpool" (1761). The 
following from an election rhyme in 1790 exemplifies the popular 
feeling towards the end of the century : 

" If the slave trade had gone, there's an end to our lives, 
Beggars all we must be, our children and wives, 
No ships from our ports their proud sails e'er would spread, 
And our streets grown with grass, where the cows might be fed.*' 



ii6 INFLUENCE OF MARITIME COMMERCE 

confined to Liverpool, and which was made more 
noticeable as the century advanced by its contrast 
with the increasing comforts and ameliorations of social 
life. Sailors who took an actual part in carrying on 
the trade were necessarily directly brutalised and, 
though steadfast and courageous at sea, added to the 
degradation of the lower classes in the town. No- 
where else in England did this element exist to the 
same extent, and nowhere was it so dominating in 
its evil influence as in Liverpool. 

In the more important concerns of municipal life 
the citizen was also reminded that the prosperity 
of the community depended on the sea and its com- 
merce. If a man wished to become a merchant he 
had to be a freeman of the town, and for this 
privilege he paid from ^zo to ^^30, and the town 
dues, which were another source of income to the 
Corporation, rose and fell with the fluctuations of 
commerce. 

The pious benefactor owed his affluence to the sea. 
The Blue Coat School, which still remains a flourishing 
institution, was founded by Bryan Blundell, who, 
in the early part of the century, owned and com- 
manded his own ship. In his praiseworthy aims he 
was assisted by Robert Stithe, a clergyman, to whom 
Captain Blundell once said that he hoped " to be 
giving him something every voyage for the school." 
These words were spoken before 171 3, and many years 
later, about 1750, Blundell was able to congratulate 
himself that he had been treasurer of the institution 



THE SEAPORT 117 

for thirty-seven years, during which time, he added, 
" more than four hundred children have been put 
out apprentices, mostly to sea, in which business 
many of them are masters and some mates of ships ; 
several of them have become benefactors to the 
school." ^ From the Blue Coat School to the fore- 
castle was the natural transition of promising Liver- 
pool boys, and from the forecastle to the quarter- 
deck. 
/ After long months at sea the mariners returned 
to their homes by the Mersey — ^from tedious voyages 
to the coast of Africa, from arduous struggles across 
the North Atlantic to the American colonies — or 
from frequent passages to Irish ports. These reso- 
lute and rugged men were, even at home, separated 
from the rest of their countrymen, and, when they 
left their city it was always to resume their calling 
on the ocean. With them, when they set sail, went 
the thoughts, the hopes, and the fears of all who 
stayed on shore who looked across the seas toward 
the West, not to England over the bleak pastures 
and mosses which lay behind the city. 

These were the men who, for the latter part of 
the century, from the commencement of the Seven 
Years' War, in 1756, to the end of the Napoleonic 
War, manned the Liverpool privateers. Their feats 
of daring, and the value of the prizes which they 
carried into the Mersey, became household stories 

^ Narrative of Mr. Bryan Blundell cited in Baines' " History of 
Liverpool," p. 406. 



ii8 PRIVATEERSMEN 

in every home in the town. Press gangs were com- 
pelled to obtain hands for the King's ships with 
brutal violence, but at this very time the gangways 
of the privateers were thronged with men anxious 
to seek their fortune under some courageous captain. 
However rash and headstrong the gentlemen sea- 
men, as it was often the fashion to call them, may 
have been, captains of the privateers were men 
not only of desperate courage, but patient, wary, 
and farseeing commanders. The hand-to-hand sea 
fight, the constant watch for the enemy's merchant- 
men or frigates in fair weather or in foul, the de- 
cision to fight or to fly, were daily elements in a life 
which produced a magnificent race of seamen, worthy 
successors of the Elizabethan rovers. But it was 
one little appreciative of the tameness of home-life, 
or of the aims and the ideas of a home-staying 
population. These men, however, gave to the 
people of Liverpool a new and peculiar spirit of 
personal adventure, of pecuniary speculation, and 
of militant patriotism which, in the eighteenth 
century, permeated all classes of the community of 
the seaport. / 

The merchant who fitted out a privateer waited 
anxiously for the hour when his ship should return, 
sometimes in triumph with a rich merchant-vessel in 
its wake, sometimes with battered hull and damaged 
sails, scarcely able to beat up the estuary ; sometimes 
captain and crew had earned sufiicient prize-money 
to keep them in comfort, almost in affluence, for 





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THE SEAPORT 119 

the rest of their lives ^ — if they did not spend it on 
drink and on gambling. The Alison, of one hundred 
and fifty tons, with an armament of sixteen carriage- 
guns and twenty-four swivels, manned by a crew of 
one hundred men, which sailed from Liverpool on 
July I, 1756, soon after the outbreak of the Seven 
Years' War, having captured a West Indiaman and 
cargo valued at ^20,000, was one of those which 
soon made an enormous profit. But there was also 
another end to the adventure, and sometimes the 
crew came ashore weary and wounded, lamenting the 
loss of gallant comrades.^ Sometimes neither ship 
nor crew ever again saw the Mersey, and whilst those 
who had risked their capital suffered a financial 
disaster, sorrow and mourning touched the homes of 
the seamen. 

During the American Revolutionary War, which 
ended ini 782, Liverpool merchants fitted out more than 

1 " A box of diamonds was discovered on Friday on board the 
Carnatic French East Indiaman, which has arrived in the river, to 
the no small satisfaction of the captors " (Williamson's Liverpool 
Advertiser, November 27, 1778). 

2 " The best contested battle fought by any of the Liverpool 
privateers, during this war (the American War of Independence), 
was that fought by the Watt, Captain Coulthard, and the American 
ship, Trumbull, Captain Nicholson. The armament of the Watt was 
32 twelve- and six-pounders, that of the Trumbull '3,6 twelve-pounders. 
They fought for several hours often within pistol shot of each other, 
and were both of them pretty nearly knocked to pieces. The Watt 
lost eleven men, killed ; the Trumbull its captain and fifty-seven 
men. It was a drawn battle, and both the vessels were nearly sinking 
when they got back into port : the Watt into Liverpool, the Trumbull 
into New London " (Williamson's Liverpool Advertiser, July 27, 1780). 



120 A MARITIME COMMUNITY 

a hundred and twenty privateers and a list of seventy- 
one of the principal ships shows that the aggregate 
of their crews was 4,439 men. The whole fleet was 
not at sea at the same moment, so that these four 
thousand and odd men could not have been at sea 
at one time but, on the other hand, the ships enu- 
merated in the list were not the whole of the Liverpool 
privateers. In 1771 it was computed that there 
were 5,967 seamen employed in Liverpool ships, 
which number, it may be assumed, includes those 
who formed part of the crews of the privateers. The 
total population of Liverpool may be taken in 1771 
to have been about 36,000, so that about one-sixth 
of the population was engaged in a seafaring life, 
on board merchant ships or privateers. 

This proportion is of one class only interested 
in maritime adventures, and, permanently resident on 
shore were the shipowners, the merchants, the ship 
builders, the ship chandlers, and others, a diverse com- 
munity, each one, continually following the fortunes 
of ships cruising near and far, his eyes fixed on the 
sea, his thoughts ever upon it, hoping, expecting, 
fearing, watching for the favourable wind, trembling 
as the gale swept through the narrow streets, patiently 
awaiting news of a protecting convoy, welcoming 
the fortunate privateer. The frequenters of coffee- 
taverns in Fleet Street might read of a lucky capture, 
or of the wreck of a West Indiaman. To them it 
was impersonal news, and news which scarcely at all 
reached the Cathedral towns, or the agricultural 



THE SEAPORT 121 

communities of the home counties. To men and 
women in Liverpool these daily tidings were of 
continuous interest, and implied fortune or disaster, 
a happy home-coming or the patient bearing of a 
common sorrow. 

These maritime events, these thrilling adventures 
in near and distant seas, knit the people of Liverpool 
together by a common bond, one unfelt in the rest 
of England. They were isolated yet in touch with 
the wider world, provincial yet universal, a com- 
munity unlike any other in the land. The aspirations 
of the new citizen of the manufacturing towns had 
small place in the mind of the Liverpool citizen, 
who, when he was not counting the profit he had 
accumulated in an African — it might be of a Green- 
land — venture, was patiently hoping that the pri- 
vateer in which he had a share would bring in a 
valuable prize. His thoughts, were he rich or poor, 
were set upon the sea, as were those of all with whom 
he came in contact day by day. To him the things 
which interested and occupied his fellow-countrymen 
away from the sea were of secondary importance, and 
to most of these, if they thought of him at all, he 
was somewhat of an enigma, a person with peculiari- 
ties and aims which they could not share. He was 
essentially unpolitical, but called himself a Whig, 
because he was hostile to the religion of the Stuarts, 
and because they were inclined to tamper with his 
civic and commercial freedom. Unlike the citizens 
of Manchester, who raised a regiment, he disliked the 



122 POLITICAL TENDENCIES 

war with the American Colonies becanse it interfered 
with shipping business ; he remonstrated against 
it and complained bitterly, but consoled himself by 
fitting out privateers, in the hope of balancing the loss 
of freights and commissions by the sale of captured 
ships and cargoes. 

It was not till the end of the century that this 
city, with its faint Whig proclivities in politics, and 
its puritanical tendencies in religion, became the Tory 
though Low Church stronghold it has since remained. 
Modern Low Churchmen are Puritans under another 
name, and Liverpool Whigs became Tories from two 
causes, each clearly visible in the eighteenth century 
— opposition to the abolition of the Slave Trade, 
which was accomplished by a Whig Ministry, and a 
belligerent anti-French spirit created and fostered 
by the practice of privateering — a spirit which caused 
men in Liverpool to regard the Whigs as in sympathy 
with their enemies in France. Nor was the long 
isolation of the place without its influence. The 
revolution in ideas which began in the eighteenth 
century, and which has been called by so many 
different names in relation to its effect on various 
forms of human activity, was in politics essentially 
Liberal in its character. Liverpool, standing, as I 
have described, apart from the rest of England, would, 
in any case, have inclined to the party of inaction, 
even without the influences which have just been 
indicated. 

But the peculiar political opinions of Liverpool in 



THE SEAPORT 123 

the nineteentli century are only connected with Liver- 
pool the seaport of the eighteenth century, in so 
far as they were the product of remarkable elements 
in commercial life during the years in which we are 
surveying the English scene. Of this scene, Liverpool 
the seaport is for many the most suggestive part. 
Steadily working out its destiny through the ages, it 
had in this epoch reached a singularly distinctive and 
emphatic place, which it has since retained. Its iso- 
lation, its comparative indifference to influences at work 
in other parts of England, to the claims of literature, 
of art, and of social improvement, its energetic and 
patient absorption in a single occupation which 
brought its citizens into touch with the most dis- 
tant parts of the globe, gave it a permanent civic 
idiosyncrasy. Without Liverpool England in the 
eighteenth century would have wanted a conspicuous 
and interesting element in its polity, a picturesque 
and unique feature of the scene. 

Note. — The chief authorities for this chapter are : " A History 
of Liverpool," by Ramsay Muir ; " Memorials of Liverpool," by 
Sir James A. Picton ; " The History of Liverpool," by Thomas 
Baines ; " History of the Liverpool Privateers, with an Account of 
the Liverpool Slave Trade," by Gomer Williams. 



PA'BJ' II 

CONSPICUOUS GROUPS 

We now pass to a survey of the conspicuous figures on the 
Scene who may be placed iii a few groups with certain char- 
acteristics peculiar to the century. It is only with these 
bodies of the people — as distinct from mere individuals — 
which illustrate the age, and in which the effect of the time 
is clearly shown, that we are concerned. For instance, the 
lawyer, the doctor, and the soldier of the eighteenth century 
were, making allowances for technical knowledge, social 
changes, and dress, much the same then as they are to-day, 
and a description of them would apply in most respects to 
them now, except in some superficial aspects. 

In the foreground of the picture is a very small but bril- 
liant and striking group ; beyond, in the middle distance, 
we note increasing masses of energetic and industrious men, 
who will presently cover a much larger part of the Scene, 
and in the background are the poverty-stricken parsons, 
and the sad figures of the peasantry — helpless victims of 
irresistible time-movements. 



125 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Nobility 

In England, as in France, in the eighteenth century 
the Nobility formed numerically a very small class. 
Hardly indeed can this little group of men be called 
a class, since one large room would have contained 
them all. At the accession of George III. there 
were only one hundred and seventy-four British peers, 
twelve of whom being Roman Catholics were 
then incapacitated from sitting in Parliament. As 
the century advanced these numbers were slightly 
increased, for during the first ten years of the reign 
of George III. forty- two British peers were created, 
and during the administration of Lord North thirty 
commoners were added to the roll of the English 
Nobility.^ 

Politically and socially, the influence of the No- 
bility was out of all proportion to its numbers. The 
nobleman was in fact the most conspicuous figure 
on the Scene. Never was he so powerful, or so 
many-sided in England as in the century which pre- 
ceded his political decline — a slow decline which was 

^ Lecky, " History of England in the Eighteenth Century," vol. v. 
p. 26. 

127 



128 WIDESPREAD INFLUENCE 

in marked contrast to the sudden destruction which 
overtook the aristocracy of France at the Revolution. 
From the fact of the union in his person of pride of 
race and pride of possession, the peer continued, long 
after the century closed, to have political and social 
weight ; but neither before nor since has he possessed 
to a like extent the universal influence which he exer- 
cised all over the country in the eighteenth century. 
We meet with him in every part of England, and in 
every form of society — in the rural districts, where 
his domains and his presence dominated the county, at 
Westminster among the politicians, mingling also with 
the habitues and pleasure-seekers of St. James's Street, 
of Ranelagh, and of Vauxhall, and he was a frequent 
figure in the Courts of European capitals. It is 
always difficult, when environed by contemporary 
society, to realise, with anything approaching vivid- 
ness, the actuality of real life in the past ; and it is 
never more so than when — in this democratic age — 
we try to picture at this period the aristocracy — so 
few in numbers — in its supreme and varied activities. 
The term aristocracy meant in England in the 
eighteenth century a class of hereditary and titled 
landowners — the descendants as a class, and actually 
by family in some cases, as in those of the Percys 
and the Talbots — of the feudal barons of the middle 
ages. It was from their position as great landed 
proprietors that the power of the peers primarily 
sprung, but to this element of influence were, in the 
eighteenth century, added a number of others. 




Thomas Pelham, first Duke of Newcastle. 



THE NOBILITY 129 

Political conditions combined with social cir- 
cumstances to make the aristocracy as a class in- 
evitably pre-eminent. The nobleman possessed not 
only rank but riches, and he was in the main the 
only capitalist. He had vast landed possessions — 
such as those of the Duke of Devonshire, whom we 
may take as a significant example of his class in this 
age — when stocks and shares scarcely existed. The 
riches of the new middle class were rapidly 
accumulating, but this section of English society 
was only growing when the nobleman was govern- 
ing, whilst the nabobs, as those who had made 
fortunes in the East were contemptuously called, 
were not only few in numbers but, socially and po- 
litically, were still without much influence. Land 
— especially land which was an hereditary pos- 
session — ^was the most potent and impressive form 
of riches, and it produced in an unusual degree 
in the nobility of the eighteenth century a union of 
the power of wealth with that of political and social 
influence. 

But the nobleman not only possessed great estates, 
he was often also the proprietor of one or more 
pocket boroughs. He could thus affect legislation 
and policy in both Houses of Parliament — in the House 
of Lords by his own vote, and in the House of Com- 
mons indirectly, by the vote of his nominee who, 
in the political slang of the time, was the mouth of 
his patron, as Barre was of Lord Shelburne, and 
Rigby of the Duke of Bedford. 

9 



t35 POWER OVER MOUSE OP COMMONS 

Besides his actual parliamentary nominees, a peer 
with this power was surrounded by numbers of 
followers anxious to oblige and serve him, hoping by 
so doing for opportunities to serve themselves. " 'Tis 
a surprise to me," wrote Lady Mary Wortley Mon- 
tague to Mr. Wortley, in 1 714, " that you cannot make 
sure of some borough, when so many of your friends 
bring in Parliament men without expense." ^ Men 
who held a seat in Parliament " without expense " 
had to pay for the privilege in something else than 
cash ; they were the political servants of an aristocratic 
master who naturally looked down on " parliament 
men " whose legislative existence depended on his 
own will and pleasure. " I received," wrote George 
Selwyn, in the most natural and matter-of-fact manner, 
" a letter from Lord Carlisle, who, as he says, finds 
it necessary to recommend Gregg for the remainder 
of this Parliament to the borough of Morpeth." 
Apparently, Gregg was a mere stop-gag representative 
of this northern constituency placed in Parliament 
for a short time by Lord Carlisle, for Selwyn adds, 
" I should have been glad that the return could have 
been of the same person, whoever he may be, who is 
designed to represent it at the ensuing and general 
election." * And, in 1793, it was correctly asserted 
in a Petition to the House of Commons by the 
Society of the Friends of the People that forty 

^ " Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Her Times," p. 189. 
• " George Selwyn, His Letters and His Life " (edited by E. S. 
Roscoe and Helen Clergue), p. 254. 



THE NOBILITY 131 

peers returned " eighty-one of your honourable 
members." ^ 

But absolute as was the power of the peer over his 
nominee, it was less in practice than might have 
been expected; the nobleman was not unpatriotic, 
and he was shrewd enough not to interfere too often 
or too arbitrarily with the free action of his member. 
Sometimes the peer had only a controlling influence 
in a borough, and he frequently used it in order to 
bring into public life a man whose reputation became 
historic. " Madam, I am entirely at a loss how 
to thank your Grace for the honour and service 
which your Grace's condescending to interest your- 
self in my election at Stafford has been to me. Having 
sent the recommendation which I had the honour 
to receive from Lady Spenser to his Lordship's agent, 
I profited by the permission allowed me to make use 
of your Grace's letter as my first and best introduction 
to Lord Spenser's interest in the town." The writer 
of this fulsome epistle was Sheridan, his corre- 
spondent was the Duchess of Devonshire.^ It 
was by the aid of these aristocratic supporters that 
the famous orator was able to enter the House of 
Commons. 

The idea of a pocket borough is repulsive to the 
political purist, but the recognition by the nobleman 
of the eighteenth century of the use that might 

^ " Parliamentary Debates," vol. xxx. p. 797. And see Taylor, 
" Origin and Growth of the English Constitution," vol. ii. p. ^d'j, 
* SichePs " Sheridan," vol. i. p. 614 (note). 



132 EXERCISE OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE 

be made of his electoral influence is a tribute to 
his political sagacity and prudence. It was in 
fact a recognition of the power of parliamentary 
government, and it sharply differentiated the English 
nobleman from the aristocrat of France or, indeed, 
of any other European nation. It was a relin- 
quishment of his power as a feudal lord, the essential 
element of which is the exercise of direct personal 
rule. In place of this was an intention to take part 
in the government of the country by means which, 
though contrary to true representative principles, 
were a distinct recognition of the force of representa- 
tive government and which, however much they 
may be condemned theoretically, were certain in 
time to give place to a more correct and popular 
. system. 

The social supremacy of the nobleman often caused 
him to be dominated by individual political inclina- 
tions and impulses, and also to be indifferent to many 
of the measures which came before the House of 
Commons. This rather detached attitude gave the 
nominated member for a pocket borough more inde- 
pendence in regard to his votes than he would otherwise 
have had ; but, on the other hand, he was never safe 
from the loss of his seat, if by chance his conduct did 
not satisfy his aristocratic nominator. 

If the aristocracy had been able only to influence 
measures in the House of Lords by its own votes, 
and those in the Commons by those of its nominees, 
it would not have held the extraordinary political 



THE NOBILITY 133 

position which it did in this period. The outstand- 
ing fact was that noblemen formed by constitutional 
custom a governing class which was united by family 
ties and personal intimacies and at the same time 
was constantly, if slowly, strengthened by recruits 
from below — from the army and navy, from poli- 
ticians, and from the greater landed gentry. Behind 
them lay an impressive history. The Whig peers 
had been at once the creators and the supporters of 
the Revolution, and had ever since — sometimes too 
peremptorily — ^kept this fact before the English people. 
On the other hand^ the Tory peers had been more 
or less actively, though often more or less secretly, 
the most powerful adherents of the Stuarts, the 
leaders of the country party. So that whenever 
the ordinary Englishman in the middle of the 
eighteenth century reviewed the immediate past 
of his country, without reverting to remoter times, 
nothing struck him more than the exceeding in- 
fluence and importance of the peerage. 

This record alone was sufficient to give the 
aristocracy immense power as a governing class. It 
was, moreover, at this time, and under existing con- 
stitutional circumstances, an essential and useful 
part of the machinery of English government. With- 
out the peers there would not have been enough 
suitable men to form a Ministry, or to represent 
Great Britain at foreign courts. Though the members 
of the Cabinet were fewer than at the present day, 
they were almost entirely peers. Without con- 



1 34 POLITICAL INFLUENCE 

sidering either high or subordinate offices in a Ministry, 
we have only to bear in mind that from the adminis- 
tration of Walpole, in 1721, to that of Pitt, in 1783, 
eleven Prime Ministers were peers and that neither 
of these two great commoners could dispense with 
a cabinet of peers. If Chatham be eliminated from 
the list, the other names containing, as they do, 
those of the Dukes of Newcastle, Devonshire, Grafton, 
and Portland, are sufficient to illustrate the influence 
of the peerage in public life, for these ducal premiers 
had certainly not intellectual ability equal to their 
high rank. 

When Lord North at last fell from power, in 
1782, the three politicians who had done most in 
Parliament to overthrow the Prime Minister and to 
lessen the personal power of the King were Fox, 
Burke, and Conway. Yet the chief of the new Cabinet 
was not one of these leaders of the House of Com- 
mons, but the Marquis of Rockingham, whose good 
intentions were obvious, but whose ability was in an 
inverse ratio to his vast estates in Yorkshire. In 
other words, his influence, territorial and social, was 
of more public weight than the political capacity 
of any one of the eminent men who had fought the 
Tories so ably and so persistently in Parliament. 

In addition, moreover, to the actual governing power 
which the concentration of the administration into 
a few hands, and those chiefly of aristocrats, produced, 
it gave the latter great influence by means of the 
patronage, both lay and ecclesiastical, which they 




William Henry Cavendish, third Duke of Portland. 



\.^ 



>^* 



THE NOBILITY 135 

could dispense or effect, there was scarcely a vacant 
bishopric or benefice for which a peer had not a 
nominee. It is true that this influence, immense 
though it was, was less than might have been expected, 
because there was little feeling either of officialism 
or of caste among the peers. They governed rather 
as powerful individuals — representatives of the landed 
interest — than as members of an aristocratic caste. 
The aristocracy with all its faults had no dislike 
of the people, and was in no sense, as in France, a 
class which was a combination of small autocrats and 
high officials. 

The task of governing the peers often undertook 
to the detriment of their pleasure, in some measure 
under pressure of public opinion, and to some extent 
because they realised that it was an obligatory attribute 
of their rank. " Grafton," writes a modern historian, 
" a man of pleasure and culture, was out of his proper 
element in political life. He grudged leaving his 
kennels at Wakefield Lodge, or the heath at New- 
market, to transact public business in London, and 
preferred reading a play of Euripides at Euston to 
being bored by a debate at Westminster. On no 
other English member have the responsibilities of 
office had so little effect ; he would put off a Cabinet 
meeting for a race meeting, and even in the presence 
of the King and Queen appeared at the Opera by 
the side of his mistress, Nancy Dawson, afterwards 
Lady Maynard."^ This is the same peer of whom 
1 Hunt, " Political History of England, 1 760-1801," p. 86, 



136 A TYPICAL NOBLEMAN 

his biographer writes that he was a nobleman with a 
high sense of public duty, with a real desire to use his 
powers and his position for the good of his country,^ and 
who, in 177s, not only had the courage to speak against 
the policy of the American War in the House of Lords, 
but even expostulated in private with the King, 
and was consequently deprived of the Privy Seal. 

The contradictory elements in Grafton's character, 
as is shown in these descriptions, and the several 
contrasts of his life, so far from proving that the 
third Duke of Grafton was a strange and unusual 
being, in fact cause him to be typical of his class 
with its supreme position and its apparently strange 
anomalies. That position was pre-eminent, partly 
because few men except peers had the leisure, the 
wealth, the influence, or the training, to enable 
them to take part in the administration of the 
country. Peers were, in truth, educated expressly to 
fit them to govern. The Grand Tour was part of 
the education of a nobleman, it was often as 
usual as residence at Oxford or Cambridge and was 
sometimes the sequel to a stay at one of these 
universities. Noblemen formed a distinct and 
favoured section of the university— exempt during 
most of the century from the ordinary discipline 
and from the usual examinations. " In several col- 
leges " (at Oxford), says an anonymous writer in 1790, 
who took up his pen in defence of the existing state 
of the university, "the heirs of the first families in 

1 Sir W. Anson, " Memgirs of the Third Puke of Grafton," p. 7. 




Augustus Henry, third Duke of Grafton. 



THE NOBILITY 137 

the kingdom submit to the same exercises and to the 
same severity of discipline with the lowest members 
of the Society."^ 

One has but to note that the writer of this passage 
considers the young nobleman's submission to dis- 
cipline and examinations as a favour conferred by 
him on the university to perceive, how from his 
birth, the peer was regarded as a person above and 
apart from the general body of Englishmen. At the 
beginning of his career, in the place where rank should 
be the least valued, he was, in the estimation even 
of those in authority, on a pinnacle above his fellow- 
men. That, undisciplined and untaught, he should 
leave Oxford or Cambridge almost as ignorant as 
when he entered is not surprising; but if he im- 
bibed but little learning, his stay at these universities 
imbued him with the feeling that nature had placed 
him in a favoured and special class. From one point 
of view, therefore, the Grand Tour was the chief 
period of his education. His travels were not superficial 
sight-seeing expeditions, — they were often under- 
taken with a tutor, sometimes singularly unfitted to 
improve the moral tone of an impressionable youth. 
The main purpose of the Grand Tour was indeed 
to educate the young peer, and also to give him a 
better knowledge of foreign affairs and courts. 

^ Cited, Wordsworth's " University Society in the Eighteenth 
Century," p. loo. At Eton, down to 1737, noblemen were placed 
at the heads of their respective forms in the school lists. Lyte, 
"Jij^toiy of Et04 College," p. 304. 



138 THE GRAND TOUR 

Lord Chesterfield planned a most elaborate Grand 
Tour for his son — he might have been his legitimate 
offspring. " Things," he wrote, in one of his letters 
concerning this youth, " go to the full as well as I 
could wish at Leipsig ; we are absolutely masters 
of Latin, Greek, French, and German, the last of 
which we write currently ; we have le Droit public 
de I'Empire ; history and geography were read, so 
that, in truth, now we only want rubbing and clean- 
ing. We begin for that purpose with Berlin at 
Christmas next, Vienna at Lady Day, and the 
Academy at Turin at Midsummer ; for a whole year. 
Then to Paris, et si cela ne nous de trotte pas, il 
faut que le diable s'en mele." ^ 

The nobleman early in life thus gained an insight 
into continental society, and often came into intimate 
contact with those who were responsible for the 
conduct of affairs in foreign countries. Once across 
the Channel, he remained abroad for some time — 
it might be even for two or three years — and pursued 
his way leisurely, making long stays at capitals, taking 
part in the social pastimes of the governing classes, 
sometimes brought into touch with reigning sover- 
eigns. A first-hand knowledge of European affairs 
was thus acquired which gave the aristocracy a 
familiarity with foreign politics enabling them not 
only to discuss these subjects in Parliament with 
efficiency and weight, but making them also the 
diplomatists of the nation. 

1 " Letters," vol. iii. p. 297. 



THE NOBILITY 139 

From the accession of William III. to the death 
of George 11. Great Britain may be regarded as in 
many respects a Continental power, and noblemen 
formed the only class in the country which was able 
to deal with affairs from this point of view. The 
peer was at home in a foreign milieu. Scarcely any 
one else knew foreign languages at all. Some of 
the more accomplished of the aristocracy, as, for 
instance, Lord Chesterfield, carried on their corre- 
spondence in French. The English nobleman in 
the eighteenth century was in fact noticeably cosmo- 
politan in his habits and tone of mind, and was a 
welcome and a frequent guest in Parisian salons. 

This early acquaintance with the Continent had 
the effect not only of removing an insular atmosphere 
from the minds of the men who had actually been 
abroad, it affected also their contemporaries and 
associates, so that the whole aristocracy was to some 
extent familiar with foreign literature and art, and 
with the agreeable society of Paris — the intellectual 
centre of all Europe. The result was a remarkable 
entente cordiale between the governing classes of 
the two capitals, between the English nobleman 
and the French aristocrat, and a number of close 
personal friendships may be noted, a unique con- 
dition in international society which is only to be 
found during the eighteenth century. 

The English nobleman's personal knowledge of 
France and of Italy was certainly one of the causes 
which tended to make him at this period the chief 



I40 COLLECTORS OF WORKS OF ART 

collector of works of art. By reason of the hereditary 
principle and of family pride ancestral portraits 
had gradually accumulated in many mansions, and 
to the wish to increase them was now added a 
desire to enlarge the contents of the nobleman's 
galleries by other works and pictures, a desire 
stimulated by his Continental travels. He was thus 
an art collector not like the Venetians, from a 
love of beauty, but chiefly because the collecting of 
pictures had become a vogue among his class, one 
which could be gratified by himself on his foreign 
tours. Even the most hardened gambler was often a 
purchaser of pictures, and felt bound to follow the 
prevailing fashion. 

The first Duke of Northumberland spent his money 
as lavishly on works of art as on cards. " Lord 
Northumberland's great gallery," writes Horace Wal- 
pole, " is finished and opened ; it is a sumptuous 
chamber, but might have been in better taste," and 
then Walpole goes on to criticise the pictures, which 
his friend Sir Horace Mann had purchased for the 
Duke in Italy. Some sixteen years later he tells 
Lady Ossory how the same nobleman had lost ^^2,000 
at quinze to the Duke of Marlborough. The Duke of 
Queensberry — " old Q." — the most unblushing roue 
of his time, filled his huge villa at Richmond with the 
collection which he had purchased at the Cornbury 
sale. Frederick, fifth Earl of Carlisle, was a consider- 
able collector, and in the correspondence of George 
Selwyn with him we obtain a glimpse of the every- 



THE^NOBILITY 141 

day character of this fashion in high life. " I dined 
yesterday," writes the famous man about town, in 
March, 1 78 1, "at Lord Ashburnham's. I saw in . 
his room a Teniers of the same size as yours — the 
same subject ; he thinks his own the best. It may 
be so. Je ne sais pas faire la comparaison, sans etre 
connaisseur. But he assures me he gave but fifty 
guineas for it at most ; voil^ ce qui m'enrage." ^ 
Lord Carlisle was a nobleman who took a share in 
the public life of the age, and Lord Ashburnham 
was a peer who from time to time held various Court 
appointments. Neither affected in the least to pose 
as a skilled connoisseur, yet throughout his life each 
spent not a little money in the purchase of works of 
art. When Mrs. Lybbe Powys visited Knowle, then 
the seat of the Duke of Dorset, she was astonished at 
the many works of art which she saw and, after telling 
how impossible it is to enumerate them, concludes 
by saying that " the present Duke has just bought 
many, being just returned from abroad, particularly 
a Lucretia by Titian, from Rome." ^ 

In Continental cities the nobleman was something 
of a millionaire, and there were scarcely any others 
able to compete with him, for merchants and manu- 
facturers were for the most part engrossed in making 

^ " Hist. MS. Comm. i8th Rep.," App., part vi. p. 474. 

^ Passages from the "Diaries of Mrs. Lybbe Powys," p. 150. 
The purchases of Italian pictures for the Earl of Dartmouth by 
his agent in Rome, Thomas Jenkins, are described in the corres- 
pondence preserved at PatshuU. "Hist. MS. Comm. 15th. Rep.," 
App., part i., vol. iii., pp. 1 67-1 71 (1752-7). 



14^ PATRONAGE OF LITERATURE 

fortunes at home. The peer purchased pictures with 
little critical capacity but with an open purse, and 
he was ready also to receive works of art from Con- 
tinental agents when in England. The hereditary 
house afforded abundant space in which to place his 
purchases, and to the ancestral portraits by Vandyke 
and Kneller he now added the works of Italian and 
Dutch painters, so that many of the homes of the 
nobility became cosmopolitan galleries of art. They 
were appreciated by their possessors chiefly as signs 
of great wealth and of aristocratic refinement, but 
they were unknown to the people, and were without 
any influence on the artistic growth of the nation. A 
later century and unborn generations were to receive 
the benefit of the expenditure on works of art of the 
nobleman of the eighteenth century. Yet this 
fashion produced a familiarity with pictures and gave 
many noblemen a considerable knowledge, not so much 
of art as of a certain class of paintings, producing a 
superficial but agreeable culture which at this time 
characterised the entire aristocracy. 

The patronage accorded by the great in the 
eighteenth century to men of letters has long been a 
recognised feature of English literary history, but it 
has been regarded rather in relation to the author 
than to the peer. The fact that the nobleman of 
the eighteenth century was a patron of letters was 
attributable more to his social influence and wealth 
than to love of literature. His conduct in this respect 
was a remarkable proof of the pre-eminent position 



THE NOBILITY 143 

then held by the nobleman in England. When 
Pope dedicated his "Windsor Forest" to Lord Lans- 
downe and in the forefront of that poem announced 
to the world that its greatest ornament was that it 
bore his lordship's name on its first page, this most 
self-seeking of poets was thinking of his pocket. A 
present-day divine who obtains the patronage of 
a duchess for a bazaar may be sure that it will attract 
a number of buyers, and in most cases this lady will 
consider it a social duty to make the affair a success. 
The aristocratic patron in the eighteenth century 
when he accepted a dedication from a man of letters 
occupied a similar position, and became for the time 
his pecuniary and social protector. He not only 
often put his hand into his pocket — the Duke of 
Wharton, to whom Young dedicated his tragedy of 
" Revenge," is said to have given the poetical divine 
j^2,ooo — but he brought his social influence to bear, 
and he was able to pose as a man of culture, while 
his protege felt bound, when occasion offered, to 
sound the praises of his patron. 

A few of the aristocracy — often the foremost 
personages in it — were undoubtedly real lovers of 
literature, and associated as such with men of letters. 
In the early part of the century Queen Anne's 
Prime Minister — the first Earl of Oxford — enjoyed 
an evening with Gay, Prior, and Arbuthnot, and in 
the middle of the century Lord Shelburne was in- 
timate with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds. 
Bubb Doddington, who was created Lord Melcombe, 



144 A CULTURED CLASS 

and himself wrote verses, entertained, in a friendly 
and hospitable manner. Young, Thomson, and other 
writers, at his palatial house in Dorsetshire, not to 
mention Voltaire when he was staying in England, in 
1726. An appreciation of literature and a knowledge 
of books thus became a characteristic of the aris- 
tocracy, even of those in it who were what in modern 
parlance would be called fast, such as Philip, Duke 
of Wharton, who dissipated the whole of his patrimony, 
and, according to Pope, wished to emulate Rochester 
as a wit, and Cicero as a senator. 

If the knowledge possessed by noblemen was 
not profound, it at least gave them a kind of cultured 
refinement which sharply distinguished peers from 
squires. The squirearchy, though from time to 
time it supplied the aristocracy with new members, 
was in the main jealous of it, whilst the peerage, which 
again, generally speaking, meant the cultured class, 
looked down on men who were as a whole boorish in 
manner, illiterate, and who devoted most of their days 
to field sports. Squire Western is unquestionably a 
type of the country gentleman of the eighteenth 
century, and his dislike and jealousy of the peerage 
is a leading feature in his character. Humorous 
writers found amusing material in this antagonism of 
classes. When Lord Ringbone, " the reprobate, 
gouty old peer," would have had the musicians, 
whom the mayor and aldermen of Bath had sent 
to perform at the lodgings, kicked downstairs, Mr. 
Simkin Barnard, the simple-minded young squire, flies 



THE NOBILITY 145 

into a rage, in which his dislike of the aristocracy 
is clearly evinced. 

" As absurd as I am, 
I don't care a damn 
For you, nor your valete de sham ; 
For a lord, do you see, 
Is nothing to me, 
Any more than a flea ; 
And I'll do as I please while I stay in the house; 
For the B-n-r-d family all can afford 
To part with their money as free as a lord." ^ 

This jealousy was natural, for the squire had a 
parochial influence only, and was essentially provincial, 
whilst the peer had more or less of county power, 
and was at the same time cosmopolitan. 

Neither in religion nor morals did a peer differ 
from a squire or from any other member of the 
middle class. He was neither better nor worse than 
his neighbours, though any striking breach of the 
moral code by one of the aristocracy then, as now, 
attracted the attention of the public. Of this the 
notorious profligacy of the Duke of Queensberry, or 
"Old Q.," as he was familiarly called, is familiar 
instance. Happily, unlike the French nobleman, 
the English peer was not obliged in early youth 
to marry some child whom he scarcely knew — with 
the inevitable result that marriage was in France 
regarded by husband and wife, not as a tie based on 
affection, but only as a duty to the family and to 
perpetuate the race. 

1 Anstey, " The New Bath Guide " (edition 1 784), p. 40. 
10 



146 THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT 

The English aristocrat was essentially a grand 
seigneur who did everything on a large scale. He 
built magnificent houses, such as Buckingham House 
in the capital, and in the country as at Castle Howard, 
Eastbury, Bowood, Wentworth, and Woburn,^ which 
with others " solid, masculine, and unaffected," remain 
as monuments of the age when the aristocracy was pre- 
eminent, and which have left a marked impression on 
the domestic architecture of rural England. In Paris 
and in London the nobleman was equally at home. 
He played — often in a lavish manner — the patron of 
letters, he spent hundreds on pictures, and thousands 
at cards, and he was cabinet minister, diplomatist, 
and wire-puller. He had, in fact, at this time reached 
the zenith of his influence and, in a remarkable and 
unique degree, political, social, and financial power 
was in this period combined in his person, for the 
middle class — the Men of the Industrial Revolution 
— which was presently to lessen every side of his in- 
fluence, was still only in the making. 

^ Reginald Blomfield, " A Short History of Renaissance Architecture 
in England," p. 190. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Middle Class 

As we turn from the Nobility to the Middle Class 
in the eighteenth century, it is like passing from an 
inspection of some complete and highly finished 
piece of work to a large and inchoate mass in which 
lie immense possibilities of future development. 

The importance of the middle class as a factor in 
the development of society and of literature in this 
age can scarcely be overrated. " The most im- 
portant fact in English history during the eighteenth 
century is the rise of a new middle class." ^ Analysing 
the literary qualities of Defoe, Sir Leslie Stephen also 
has something to say about the development of this 
new class of readers, " Outside the polished circle 
of wits we have the middle class, which is beginning 
to read, and will read what it really likes." ^ But 
these fragmentary allusions to a remarkable fact, 
although they suggest reflections, are somewhat 
tantalising. For this admittedly important element 
in English society which was then in process of growth 

1 " The Life of Wesley," by C. T. Winchester (New York and 
London, 1906). 

2 " English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century," 
p. 137. 

147 



148 DEFINITION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 

is touched on lightly and inferentially, and under the 
assumption that the reader must know all about it. 

When the phrase, the middle class, is used, it is 
intended to comprise a large and varied class, one 
which has a perceptible milieu of its own and which 
is distinct from other portions of the community, 
less by its manner of life than by its general mental 
and moral tone and by the definite character of 
that tone. 

If we analyse this statement a little more in detail 
it is obvious that neither a peasant nor a noble- 
man belongs to the middle class, but that, between 
the one and the other are a number of persons in 
different stations of life, living under different con- 
ditions, and in different places, in town and country, 
some rich and some poor, individually differing in 
character, in disposition, and in the objects after 
which they are striving. But in spite of these per- 
sonal differences this immense stratum stands in 
our mental vision — blending, it is true, with the class 
above and below it — not as a particular aggregation of 
people with similar daily occupations, but as a great 
mass connected by broad common ideas and tastes, 
a perfectly definite and comprehensible whole. So 
general are some of its characteristics — its common 
sense, its want of imagination, its monotonous life — 
that the words have often obtained something of 
contemptuous significance as of grovelling mediocrity, 
unfair indeed to not a few of those who belong 
to this part of the population. Qualities not without 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 149 

merit have become exaggerated into faults and so 
have created impressions which, from an historical 
point of view in regard to society in the eighteenth 
century, are often erroneous. 

Socially the middle class is composed of persons 
nearly all of whom have an occupation for the 
purpose of earning a livelihood, and whose entire 
day is in the main, therefore, engrossed by commerce 
or manufacture, law, medicine, or agriculture. -"^ 
Though the clergy and persons who are teachers at 
Oxford or Cambridge have some distinct mental 
characteristics, tending to separate them in some 
degree from the rest of this class, yet these distinctions 
are not so numerous or so strong as actually to take 
those who possess them out of the section of society 
to which they naturally belong. Though it is use- 
ful to identify the middle class with those who are 
engaged in the above-stated ways, one must not 
draw too strict a line, for the middle class must be 
recognised as including every one who may, with 
reasonable accuracy, in consequence of temperamental 
likeness, be considered as of it. 

Not until the eighteenth century is reached did 

^ " What had since happened (the writer is referring to the period 
after 1760) had been the growth of a great comfortable middle class, 
meaning by the middle class the upper stratum, the professional 
men, the lawyers, clergymen, physicians, the merchants who had 
been enriched by the growth of commerce and manufactures ; the 
country gentleman whose rents had risen and who could come to 
London and put off their old rusticity." Stephen, " English Litera- 
ture and Society in the Eighteenth Century,"^_p. 192. 



150 PERSONS FORMING THE MIDDLE CLASS 

this portion of the population, lying between the 
great landowners and the peasantry in the country, 
and above the manual workers in towns and villages, 
exist as a definite body. Hitherto it had neither the 
numbers nor the homogeneity nor the common 
feeling which would allow it to be designated as a 
middle class. In the towns were lawyers and phy- 
sicians, merchants who were often wealthy, and 
some manufacturers, such as the Sussex iron masters 
of the sixteenth century, or the cloth merchants of 
the western counties. In the country were many small 
landed gentry and innumerable yeomen. But the 
only union among the townsmen was municipal as in 
the town council, or mercantile as in the guild, which, 
however, was a mediaeval rather than a modern institu- 
tion. Such influence as a middle-class person possessed 
was therefore individual rather than corporate. 

The Squires, with common occupations and 
pleasures, had necessarily like tastes and ideas, but 
they were a species of inferior rural aristocracy, 
living in greater sympathy, political and social, with 
the patricians, whom they bowed down to, than with 
the commercial people, whom they scarcely recognised 
and generally despised. The yeomen who, up to 
the beginning of the eighteenth century, formed so 
important a body, and from whom the soldiers of the 
Parliamentary armies had been largely recruited, 
were, owing to the difiiculty of communication, far 
from homogeneous, and were socially even more akin 
to the labourer than to the squire. They belonged 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 151 

to a distinct class, but it was rather a class of indi- 
viduals than such a section of the population as the 
middle class became after the middle of the eighteenth 
century. For with the eighteenth century vital 
changes are noted. Isolated individuals, those who 
lived in provincial towns and in London, in rural 
districts and in cities, began to be welded together 
by more frequent intercourse and by common ideas, 
feelings, and interests, partly the result of the influence 
of new forms of literature, and partly of the com- 
bination of capitalists and manufacturers in support 
of their business interests. 

The rise of a class of master manufacturers, though 
it primarily affected the industrial condition of Eng- 
land, had also important social results which were 
clearly visible by the end of the century.-^ It pro- 
duced a considerable body of men, sagacious and 
self-reliant, many of whom, by reason of the applica- 
tion of science to industry, as in the case of Josiah 
Wedgwood, possessed a first-rate knowledge of art 
and mechanics. They were an intellectual leaven in 
their neighbourhood. Mathew Boulton, who was 
the son of a Birmingham toyshop keeper, liked to 
assemble about him at his home near Handsworth, 
not far from his metal works, which were founded 
in 1759 — the products of which were valued all 
over Europe — a group of friends. They used to go 

^ Les creatcurs du systeme de fabrique ont crec en meme temps 
une classe, une especc sociale nouvelle." Mantoux, " La Revolution 
Industrielle au XVIII« Siede," p. 379. 



152 QUALITIES OF THE MANUFACTURERS 

to his house when the moon was at the full, and so 
became known as the Lunar Society.-^ Here every 
new invention and its effects on trade and society 
were keenly discussed. 

For business purposes these men — assisted by 
the marked improvements in highways which are 
noticeable after 1745 — went all over England, and 
often to the Continent. They had correspondents 
at home and abroad, and in their age were chiefs of 
industry, able, methodical, and ambitious. At one 
and the same time, they were amassing wealth and 
spreading knowledge. The majority, it is true, had 
neither the love of art of Wedgwood nor the knowledge 
of science of Boulton ; but they had, as has been 
well said, the qualities of conquerors — ambition, 
boldness, untiring energy, and also egotism. If 
most of them were less personally admirable than a 
select number who united agreeable qualities with 
the higher characteristics of the man of action, they 
were all equally important factors in the creation of 
the middle class. These manufacturers and their 
families were in many districts supplanting the dis- 
appearing yeomen, from whom not a few were sprung ; 
in other parts they were buying out the squires, 
everywhere in England forming groups which, un- 
perceived by their contemporaries, were annually 
adding to the numbers, the wealth, the independence, 
and the influence of the stratum of society to which 
they belonged. 

^ Smiles, " Lives of Boulton and Watt," p. 369. 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 153 

One need scarcely exemplify further the details of 
the movement. This intellectual vitality, however, 
bringing with it increased material comfort arising 
from successful work in business, and a sense of com- 
radeship, was nowhere more remarkable than in 
Norwich and its neighbourhood, where the families 
of Taylor and Martineau, in the latter half of the 
century, formed the centre of a large circle marked 
by intellectual cultivation and by uncommon ability. 
Here, too, the Gurneys, a memorable Quaker family, 
had obtained remarkable success in business, and 
had increased the prosperity of the city and the 
importance of the middle class. By the establishment 
about 1750 of a Book Club in Birmingham, which 
became a nucleus of the intelligence and culture of 
the town, and, in 1779, of a public library^ we see 
evidence of the same tendencies. In Liverpool, at 
last, towards the close of the century, each coffee- 
house had usually a reading-room attached to it ; 
there, too, in 1769, an Academy of Art was founded, 
and literary societies were established by some of the 
citizens. 

In fact, the material prosperity and the higher 
standard of mental attainment of the middle class 
in the provincial towns is not the least important 
fact in the development of this section of the people 
during the eighteenth century. If we realise the 
cumulative effect of the progress of the several centres, 
we can perceive the class in which we are interested 

1 Langford, " A Century of Birmingham Life," pp. 57, 283, 



IS4 THE NABOB 

increasing and spreading, like a rising tide, over the 
whole of England. Memoirs, letters, and biographies 
have fixed attention so much on London in the 
eighteenth century, and especially on a small if in- 
fluential society in the West End of the town, that 
we are prone to minimise, or at any rate not to realise, 
the immense force, moral and political, which was 
so rapidly growing in the provinces, and especially 
in the Midlands and in the North of England. 

The influence of India on the material and social 
growth of the middle class is also a remarkable 
feature, one which has never received due atten- 
tion. Private fortunes and public reputations were 
gained in the East by men of modest birth, who 
returned to England united by common business 
interests and by official ties, adding at once to the 
wealth and to the reputation of the class to which 
they belonged. Warren Hastings and Lord Clive, 
though one became an official and the other a soldier, 
were, after receiving the education of middle-class 
boys, sent out to make their fortunes as writers in the 
East India Company's service. Governor Pitt, who 
began his career at the end of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, and who sent home the famous diamond 
which is now exhibited to gaping crowds in the 
Louvre, is another example of a remarkable element 
of the age. The list could be indefinitely amplified 
by the names of many men who have gained no 
historical fame because they were men of business 
only and not politicians, though the aggregate of 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 155 

their influence on their age has been marked and 
important. 

Many of the country gentlemen were still rude and 
rough, and were well typified by Squire Western 
and Tony Lumpkin ; but they were growing fewer 
in proportion to the professional and business men, 
and their importance as a social element in the 
age has been somewhat exaggerated. Thus, through- 
out England we see emerging a homogeneous, a power- 
ful and a solid, entity, unconscious still of its own 
strength, but revealing new instincts, political and 
social — significant of a momentous, though a peaceful, 
revolution. It is a definite class, actuated by common 
ideas and sympathies, and as obviously distinct as the 
aristocracy and the peasantry. 

But of necessity the line was not sharply defined ; 
there was a fringe of persons with characteristics 
which make them indeterminate as a class. Such an 
one was Horace Walpole, who in his last years became 
Earl of Orford. He belonged to the aristocracy by 
birth, by breeding, and by temperament, yet his 
literary inclinations caused him to come into life- 
long and intimate contact with the middle class, 
though he never belonged to it. Gray and Mason, 
Mann and other friends and correspondents, were 
of it ; his books caused him to think of it, to wish 
to affect it. He is in fact on the border line, 
tastes and temperament essentially aristocratic are 
always at war with his inclination to be an author 
who will be read by the middle class. On the other 



iS6 RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 

hand, his friend George Selwyn was by birth of the 
middle class ; he was a small country gentleman as 
far as property went ; he was also an official, with a 
sinecure office, yet he was always tending towards 
the aristocracy. The fifth Earl of Carlisle and his 
family were his dearest friends ; he was constantly 
in the houses and in the company of peers and peeresses, 
and his letters are filled with gossip about their daily 
doings. One cannot therefore call Selwyn a middle- 
class man either in surroundings or tastes, and he 
must be included in the number of those who belong 
to the fringe. 

Those who can be included in the class now under 
analysis at length recognised the fact that they be- 
longed — irrespective of their actual occupations — to 
a distinct stratum of the English people, one which 
was yearly growing in importance. They perceived 
the aristocracy above them, the toilers in the fields 
and the operatives of the factory below them. They 
had now a pride of class and an appreciation of their 
own value in the commonwealth; they held that 
they were superior to mechanics and peasants ; and 
though different from, yet not less important in 
modern England than, hereditary peers. 

The rise of this large and increasing mass is signalised 
by the existence of writers who were actuated by, and 
reflected, its ideas. Their works were intended to be 
read by it. Defoe, by breeding and by the course 
of his life, was essentially a middle-class man. His 
political, his social, and his economical writings, 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 157 

permanent or ephemeral, were intended to mould 
the opinions of the average middle-class citizen. 
They were addressed to men of business by a business 
man ; they put forward common-sense arguments 
to impress common-sense persons. Their very exist- 
ence was a recognition of a middle class with common 
mental characteristics then rapidly growing in size 
and power, which had now, even at the beginning 
of the century, for the first time to be considered 
as a great national factor. These people Defoe 
helped to influence, and he troubled little either 
about the peasantry, or about the aristocracy, of 
England. 

Presently Steel founded l^he ^atler^ and Addison The 
Spectator, which, with their successor. The Guardian, 
and other journals, would scarcely have existed had 
there not been a middle class which read in them 
about the foibles and the weaknesses of those who be- 
longed to their own section of society. Of this was 
Sir Roger de Coverley, the country gentleman; the 
Templar from an Inn of Court ; Sir Andrew Freeport 
the merchant ; Captain Sentry, who, having a small 
patrimony, had retired from the Army ; Will Honey- 
comb, the man about town ; and lastly, the clergyman 
without a preferment, these together formed the 
club of which The Spectator was the leader. Each 
is representative of a different section of one great 
class, which was united by a similarity of ideas 
and tastes. The doings of the members of the 
club were uninteresting to those above and below 



iS8 SQUIRES AND MEN OF BUSINESS 

them, their personalities were as much above the 
peasants as they seemed to the aristocracy to be 
below it, and neither the one class nor the other 
sympathised with the point of view of those whose 
conversations, discussions, and anecdotes were related 
by 7he Spectator, It was the mental atmosphere, 
rather than the daily occupation or the profession, 
which united these imaginary beings, vivid types, if 
not actual portraits, of living people. 

The union of ideas and the extension of the middle 
class were vitally affected by family unions between 
mercantile men and non-aristocratic country land- 
owners, and by the purchase of landed property by 
rich manufacturers who became from that moment 
lovers of the country, both of which were special 
features of the eighteenth century. Thus year by 
year the antagonism between the squires and the 
moneyed men was being broken down, tending to lessen 
the jealous fears of encroaching power, social and 
political on the one side, and the dislike of an ex- 
clusiveness and pride arising from the ownership 
of paternal acres on the other. -^ Politically the 
merchant and the squire could not usually hope 

* When Mrs. Lybbe Powys, then Miss Girle, the daughter of a 
London physician, went with her father's friend, Mr. Jackson — who 
had a house in London and a fine estate Wesenham Hall, in Norfolk — 
to the country in 1756, she says that, according to custom, " the vicar 
and his wife and near tenants were at the Hall ready to receive 
us " (" Diary," p. 3). This fact shows how gradually the pride 
of acres and the corresponding submissiveness of those who pos- 
sessed them not was dying out in the eighteenth century. 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 159 

to agree ; but the union of families was, towards the 
end of the century, tending to a union of ideas 
which was cemented by the increase of forms of 
literature which were acceptable to a middle class, 
whether recruited from the city or the manor. Ex- 
amples of this union may be found over and over 
again, sometimes among names not unfamiliar in 
eighteenth-century literature. Sir Horace Mann, 
Walpole's correspondent for half a lifetime at Florence, 
and who was constantly in contact with foreign 
grandees, and English peers on their travels, was the 
son of a London merchant who bought a property in 
Kent, while his mother was the daughter and heiress 
of a man of old family in Gloucestershire. Samuel 
Crisp, the memorable friend and adviser of Fanny 
Burney, a first-rate type of a new section of the 
middle class in the eighteenth century — the culti- 
vated men of leisure — was the son of a merchant 
whose wife likewise belonged to an old Gloucester- 
shire county family.-^ 

Samuel, or " Daddy " Crisp, as he was called by all 
the Burney family, was twenty years older than Dr. 
Burney. In his younger days, when musical com- 
panion to Fulk Greville, the Doctor had made 
Crisp's acquaintance at his patron's place, Welbury 
House in Wiltshire. He then lost sight of him, for 
Crisp seems to have gone abroad to Italy, but he 
reappeared among the Burneys after their return to 
London. Though he was a friend of that great 
1 W. H. Hutton, "Burford Papers," p. 15. 



i6o SAMUEL CRISP 

lady, Margaret Cavendish Harley, Duchess of Port- 
land, Samuel Crisp is as interesting as an eighteenth- 
century middle-class dilettante as Horace Walpole is 
as an aristocratic dilettante in the same era. He was, 
in fact, a new species, one of the first of the leisured 
middle-class amateurs who are to-day so numerous. 
Mr. Thrale, the wealthy brewer and man of business, 
with his admirable library and his collection of por- 
traits by Reynolds, was a somewhat similar character, 
though with obvious differences, who, like Crisp, 
was a new type which was, in the succeeding cen- 
tury, to increase and multiply. 

Crisp came of well-to-do parents, his mother being a 
descendant, as I have said, of a Gloucestershire family. 
In early life he was a fashionable young man, and 
had a " small though unencumbered fortune," but 
he seems to have spent rather too much money on 
pictures, sculpture, and bric-a-brac, with which his 
villa at Hampton, where he went to live about 1755, 
was filled. Presently he returned to an out-of-the- 
way place, Chessington Hall, in Surrey, which stood 
on high ground, and was approached by nothing 
more than a track from Epsom across the fields. It 
belonged to an old friend, a certain one Christopher 
Hamilton, with whom he had what Madame d'Arblay 
calls " some picnic plan," in modern phraseology he 
was a paying guest. 

Here for nearly thirty years he lived quietly, 
taking care of his health, which was always delicate : 
" my gout is so far removed that I stamp about as 



THE MIDDLE CLASS i6i 

much as I can, but am too stiff in my joints to use 
as much walking as I did before," and in vain dosing 
himself, as the fashion was, with many sorts of quack 
medicines. " I am just going to try a steel," he tells 
his sister, " a medicine of which Dr. Lewis gives a 
most wonderfully favourable recommendation in his 
book, viz., filings of iron steeped in Rhenish or old 
Hock ; now I think as I have old Hock by me, I 
cannot put it to a better use." When one reads this, 
one is not surprised that people in the eighteenth 
century did not live out their full threescore years 
and ten. 

Health and economy were sufficient reasons for 
his retirement — ^which was henceforth only broken 
by a visit to London in the spring — to a country- 
house with the host whom he liked, whence he 
could watch the world and its work, and where 
he could have his friends as guests if he wished. 
Visitors he often had ; his sister, Mrs. Gast from 
Burford, sometimes even the Thrale contingent : 
" The whole family of the Thrales last Wednesday, 
viz. Mr. Thrale, Mrs. Thrale, Miss, alias Queeny, 
and the great Dr. Johnson, came over in form to 
make me a visit — their civilities and invitations were 
beyond expression." 

The Burney family came constantly, and, when 
Fanny Burney was not staying at Chessington, she 
was corresponding with Crisp. As he was one of 
the few who were allowed to read her diary, he 
knew every detail of her daily life. It is a charm- 
II 



i62 A TYPICAL MIDDLE-CLASS MAN 

ing picture, this of the quick and sympathic girl and 
the sensible and amused elderly man, who united 
common sense to a cultivated mind and an affec- 
tionate disposition to a sound judgment. He was 
the very one to take a permanent place in Fanny Bur- 
ney's heart, for he was quite unassuming, and he 
gave her the best advice, not with an air of superior 
wisdom, but simply as an older companion. Dr. 
Burney was so busy with his music lessons, his literary 
work, and his parties, that he had little time to give 
to his children. Samuel Crisp was exactly the re- 
verse, for his life was one long space of leisure. 
Once he wrote a tragedy, " Virginia," which had 
but little merit, and only a short run at Drury 
Lane, in 1754, though Garrick himself played Vir- 
ginius. Its slight success was a keen disappointment 
to its author, who had probably set his heart on 
making up for a somewhat aimless life by a notable 
achievement as a dramatist. But he was too sensible 
a man to take his failure to heart to the extent 
which has often been asserted, though doubtless it 
accentuated for the moment his want of interest in 
a merely social life. A sound scholar, an appreciative 
critic and lover of music and the fine arts, he is 
memorable as an interesting example of a new group 
of men among the middle class. 

In the preceding century the son of the country 
landowner who went into commerce, though he was 
glad to make money, did not, in consequence of 
his mode of life, regard himself as one of the body 



THE MIDDLE CLASS 163 

of merchants. He was pleased to dig in the same 
pit, but he was out of sympathy with his fellow- 
labourers. The son born of a county family who 
went to Aleppo to amass money and lived with men 
from various parts of Great Britain bent on the 
same purpose, was one of a body of adventurers, not 
a member of a class. But as the eighteenth century 
lengthens, the tendency is towards a lessening of this 
exclusive attitude of mind, and the son of a squire 
became not only a man of business, but essentially 
one of the middle class. 



CHAPTER X 

The Intellectual Development of the 
Middle Class 

As soon as the novel takes a recognised place in English 
literature, the importance, even the existence, of 
the middle class becomes more evident. For the 
new fiction v^as intended for middle-class readers, it 
turned chiefly on the actions of middle-class people, 
and was written by persons of that class, who ex- 
pressed its feelings. Most of the famous literary 
names of the eighteenth century belong to it. Richard- 
son, Smollett, Fielding, and Fanny Burney are typical 
representatives of it ; they understood it ; and one 
reason why their books were so successful was because 
their middle-class readers saw how realistic and 
how true were the delineations, not only of manners 
and modes of life, but of feeling and thought. When 
we turn to more serious subjects we see the same 
fact equally evident. Johnson, Hume, and Gibbon 
demonstrate the literary vitality of the class for 
whom they wrote, and to which they belong. 

Among politicians Burke is the best example ; be- 
cause he was never accepted as a social equal by those 
important Whig noblemen with whom he worked in 
Parliament, and his life in London and at Beacons- 

164 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 165 

field resembled that of the middle-class gentleman 
of means both in town and country. With Lord 
Rockingham and with his neighbour at Bulstrode, 
the Duke of Portland, Burke associated as a politician 
only; with Johnson the writer, Mr. Thrale the 
wealthy brewer, and Charles Burney the music 
teacher, he forgathered in intimate social intercourse 
as a friend. Burke, in fact, typifies the political 
position of the middle class, its growing importance 
— on which the seal was eventually set by the Reform 
Act of 1832 — still but half -recognised, and that un- 
willingly, by the Crown and by the aristocracy. 

Common sense and moderation were the character- 
istics of the eighteenth century, as they are usually 
of men who are prosperous and contented, and such 
people formed the strength of, and gave character to, 
the middle class, then rapidly increasing in numbers. 
In architecture, in painting, and in literature, we find 
these qualities to be predominant throughout the age. 
Of architecture Bath is the most striking instance. 
The houses which were built by Wood and his suc- 
cessors transformed the city, they were planned for 
people who were in easy circumstances, neither for 
poor men nor for millionaires. In groups, or isolated, 
we can still find in almost every town from one end 
of England to the other substantial, unassuming, 
but yet dignified houses which recall to the onlooker 
the Georgian age, and more especially the rise and 
growing importance of that new class for whom new 
dwellings had to be found. 



i66 INCREASE OF ART 

Reynolds and Gainsborough have left many por- 
traits of the aristocracy ; they have left as many of 
those v^ho, before this period, would not have been 
portrayed. Likenesses of Johnson and Garrick, Mrs. 
Sheridan, Mrs. Crev^e, and many more too numerous 
to be mentioned, remind us that another class v^as 
in process of growth with its own desires, and a larger 
cultivation. Without an increasing appreciation of 
landscape by well-to-do professional and business men 
it would have been impossible for the painters of land- 
scapes, Gainsborough, Richard Wilson, and Paul Sandby, 
to have found a remunerative market. The increase 
of landscape art was in a measure caused by the grow- 
ing appreciation of natural scenery, even of wild country 
such as was to be found among the English lakes and 
in Welsh valleys, places which, almost unknown to 
most of the art patrons of the day, were already 
becoming the haunts of artists. Sometimes the 
artist sought to depict still more distant and more 
strange lands, as when Cozens drew the imposing 
mountains of Elba, which one can see at South 
Kensington. 

This particular appreciation not only made for 
truth in art, it prevented any growth of a school 
of painters such as that of Watteau and Lancret in 
France. It also tended to a change of taste in litera- 
ture as well as a change of social habits, and of dress 
among the middle classes. It implied not only a love 
of out-of-door life, but of physical exercise and even of 
physical exertion for the mere pleasure either of the 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 167 

exercise, or of the scenes to attain which that exertion 
was necessary. Few men valued the comforts of life 
more than Dr. Johnson ; one reason why he liked the 
Thrales' house at Streatham so well was because 
he found there excellent food and comfortable accom- 
modation yet, jvith extraordinary courage, he made 
a tour in the Highlands, passed over a rough and 
a dangerous sea to Skye, and underwent many 
hardlhips with gooBTtemper and patience, partly for 
the purpose of viewing the scenery. Two years later, 
in 1774, when he was sixty-five, he wandered through 
Derbyshire and North Wales, where the scenery was 
the first object of the tour. When he saw Hawk- 
stone, a pleasant bit of rather rugged Midland land- 
scape, it was to him " a region abounding with striking 
scenes and terrific grandeur," so vivid was the im- 
pression which the line of hills made on him. 

Gray, as is shown by his " Journal in the Lakes " 
(1769), was a close observer of the scenery of the 
North, and he enjoyed the wilder aspects of the West- 
morland dales and streams, as much as he did musings 
among the colleges of Cambridge, and quiet hours 
beneath the Buckinghamshire beeches. No one has 
described the features of the Lake country with more 
sympathy and appreciation, as of the famous falls 
of Lodore : " The stream was nobly broken, leaping 
from rock to rock, and foaming with fury. On one 
side a towering crag, that spired up to equal, if not 
overtop, the neighbouring cliffs (this lay all in shade 
and darkness), on the other hand, a rounder, broader 



i68 INCREASING LOVE OF LANDSCAPE 

projecting hill shagged with wood and illumined 
by the sun, which glanced sideways on the upper 
part of the cataract." ^ 

A quite different person, Thomas Twining, 
a Cambridge graduate, and a cultivated country 
parson, and who came of a commercial family still 
prosperous and respected, delighted in tours through 
England solely for the sake of the scenery. He 
enjoyed (1776) the " fine open boldness " of York- 
shire; he described a village as "scattered here and 
there upon broken romantic ground, houses, cottages, 
craggy hills, climbing pathways, road, water, wood, 
well mixed and beautiful." ^ This is quite a new 
intellectual feature, and this remarkable change in the 
middle class is well exemplified by the difference 
between the treatment of nature by Thomson in 
1728 and in the immediately following years during 
which " The Seasons " were published, and by 
Cowper, in 1785. "The Seasons" have been rightly 
considered by critics as marking the beginning of a 
new era in English poetry. Natural objects are 
given a first place; they are regarded as admirable 
and interesting ; they are to be noted and thought 
of by an intelligent writer, and they are often 
accurately and realistically described. They are, 
however, still looked at from the outside, from the 

1 Gray's " Works " (edited by Gosse), vol. i. p. 255. 

2 Thomas Twining, " Recreations and Studies of a Country Clergy- 
man of the Eighteenth Century, being Selections from the Corre» 
spondenc^ of T, Twining," p. jO, 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 169 

point of view of a spectator whose feelings are not 
in the least touched by what he sees. It was the 
fashion of the time to construct small, artificial gardens 
and sham waterfalls, which were not a little admired 
by people who pretended to taste. It was in the 
same spirit that Thomson described the meadows and 
the hedgerows in spring. 

By the end of the century the poetical treatment of 
nature had become subjective, rural sights and rural 
sounds could touch the feelings of a large number 
of persons, so that when Cowper wrote " The Task " 
he reflected the mental impressions which many 
now obtained from the various incidents of a simple 
out-of-door life : 

" Mighty winds 
That sweep the skirt of some far-reaching wood 
Of ancient growth, make music not unlike 
The dash of ocean on his winding shore, 
And lull the spirit while they fill the mind." 

These lines would have been incomprehensible to 
the wits, essentially townsmen, who were the literary 
arbiters at the beginning of the century; to them 
the varied sounds of wind among the trees, recalling 
a hundred memories of summer and winter, of sun- 
shine and storm, of personal pleasure or sorrow, were 
unreal. But when this poem was published, an 
accurate description of a natural fact with its resultant 
effect on the emotions and the mind, was read by the 
educated middle class, and became popular because 
it wa9 a reflection pf their own feelings and thoughts^ 



I70 OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE 

especially of the feelings of the educated among them, 
an increasing number of whom lived in the country 
and in provincial towns. All these facts indicate the 
beginning of new aspirations and ideals which were 
leading to larger views of life among the increasing 
multitude who formed the great mean between rank 
and poverty, to an interest in art and nature, and 
to a growth of physical exercise which has not yet 
ceased. 
^ No doubt a general appreciation of the open 
air, and of life in it in a quiet fashion was more 
popular than it is to-day. Every garden had its 
summer-house which was regularly used, and in 
every town, more especially in London, public gardens 
were popular resorts. \But sport was confined to the 
squires and landowners ; horse-racing was chiefly the 
amusement of the rich and of their dependents ; 
out-of-door games, except bowls, were almost un- 
known. Few rowed for pleasure on a river, and 
angling was confined to some devotees who lived near 
the banks of some stream or pond. The treatises of 
Isaac Walton and of Richard Francks in the seventeenth 
century are evidences of a genuine and considerable 
interest in angling when they were written, but 
though several editions of Walton's delightful book 
were printed in the eighteenth century, there is no 
indication of an increasing pleasure in this agreeable 
pastime, at any rate among the class with which we 
are now concerned. 

The absence of active amusements, the demand 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 171 

for anything which would break the monotony of 
life, rather than a cruel spirit, took men to the 
frequent executions of criminals as to a mere pas- 
time. As a whole, the middle class was worse 
off for amusement than either the manual labourer 
or the peer; the former had his dog-fights and bull- 
baiting, his single-stick combats, and other bloody 
but easily obtained pleasures ; the nobleman could 
shoot game and hunt foxes and hares and watch cock- 
fights, so could the squire, but the professional and 
business man had nothing but the tavern, perhaps 
with a bowling-green behind it, the coffee-house 
and the tea garden, and sometimes he went to a 
play. The increasing opportunities for travel at 
home were seized by the very section which most had 
need of it, as a substitute for the sport and the grand 
tours which to them were largely impossible. 

The absence of any kind of vigorous out-of-door life 
among girls and young women of the middle class was 
probably a cause of the prevalent feminine timidity, 
culminating often in an extreme self-consciousness — a 
form of bodily fear especially in contrast with the 
rudeness of speech which is so striking at this time. 
This characteristic is often regarded as having been 
a mere affectation, for no one to-day can imagine a 
Sophey Streatfield who could weep at will, and was 
most attractive to her friends when a tear trickled 
down her pretty cheek. She was, however, but 
an example of a physical nervousness and suscepti- 
bility which were constantly in evidence by faintings 



172 MIDDLE-CLASS YOUNG WOMEN 

and by blushings and similar external features, 
and which had actually begun to be regarded as 
" good form." A characteristic of one class in this 
age was exaggerated almost into a habit, but it arose 
because young women of the middle class were timid 
and physically weak, since they stayed so much at home. 

Mrs. Lybbe Powys — the daughter of Dr. Girle, 
a London physician living in Lincoln's Inn Fields 
— tells in her early diary, in 1757, with no little 
naivete, how, when she formed one of a party of girls 
who were walking up Matlock High Torr, they hesi- 
tated, and finally turned back, merely from a dread 
of these harmless slopes. " We tried," she writes, 
" one evening to ascend the prodigious rock I before 
spoke of, called Matlock High Torr. Many do, it 
seems, perform it, but I own I was frighted before 
I got a quarter of the way up, and each object below 
began to appear so diminutive, that I even, with some 
others, consented to be ridiculed for my fears, and 
with vast joy got down again as soon as possible, and 
even thought I felt giddy for hours after, and thought 
myself most happy when I got into the grove, one 
of the sweetest walks in Matlock." ^ This is a simple 
story, but it demonstrates how the unfamiliarity of 
the middle-class girl with natural objects and physical 
exertion affected her nerves and mind. 

But this timidity, not only out-of-doors but even 
at home, had a yet more radical cause — the middle- 
class view of the place of women in the eighteenth 

J " Passages from the Diaries of Mrs, Philip Lyhhe Powj^s," p. 30, 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 173 

century. They were still looked upon as primarily 
existing to produce children and to take care of the 
home, aud as in every way subordinate to men; in 
fact, they were regarded from a mediaeval point of 
view when around them mediaeval ideas had been 
dispersed. Every infraction of this theory, every effort 
towards the assertion of individuality or intellectual 
ideals, laid the middle-class woman open to masculine 
censure and to the adverse criticism of a majority 
of her own sex, so that, outside the kitchen and the 
nursery, she was constantly in a state of timidity pro- 
ductive of a feeling of nervous humility. 

No doubt Fanny Burney had a timid and sus- 
ceptible temperament which caused her to shrink 
from any allusions in her presence to her books. 
But allowing for this natural quality, she always 
shows a feeling that to have taken up work which 
gave her publicity and took her out of her home 
was almost unmaidenly. She was often afraid and 
ashamed of herself. She feels a satisfaction at the 
accomplishment of a public achievement, yet she is 
never sure that it is not a result which is contrary to 
the accepted standard of conduct for young ladies 
of her class. She shows herself to be often a bundle 
of contradictions, the tendencies of the present and 
of a future age conflicting in her. 

But the daughter of the peasant felt none of these 
fears and tremblings, nor did the nobleman's daughter, 
whose life was freer, and who was accustomed not 
only to more physical exertions but who moved 



174 DESIRE FOR IMPROVEMENT 

about the country-side, and took long journeys from 
the ancestral home to the London mansion. Lady 
Sarah Bunbury, with her political friends and her 
entertainments in London, her horses, her dogs, and 
her flower-garden in the country, exemplifies one 
extreme, as Sophey Streatfield and Anna Seward do 
another. When the peer's daughter was not a Diana, 
she was often a Lady Bountiful, and her very rank 
gave her a confident mien. 

This very effeminacy, this absence of interests 
and occupations outside the home, caused the clever 
young women of the middle class to be the most 
eager for the intellectual improvement of their sex, 
the most desirous of breaking out of the monotony 
of their lives, of escape from needlework and cards. 
So that from them were recruited alike story-writers 
and story-readers, most of the former of whom are 
forgotten except such eminent leaders as Fanny 
Burney and Jane Austen. 

To be able to buy pictures and see places one 
must have money and leisure, and until the middle 
of the eighteenth century neither the one nor the 
other had been sufficiently common among men of 
business and those who were engaged in professional 
pursuits, to enable either pictures to be purchased 
or places to be visited. In the mansions of the 
aristocracy were many Italian masterpieces which, 
as I have told on a previous page, had been collected 
on the Grand Tour/ or which their successive owners 

^ See ante, p. 140. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 175 

had obtained when they were engaged on official 
or diplomatic missions abroad. 

But the lawyer and the man of business travelled 
little on the Continent, and had not dwellings in 
which large canvasses could be exhibited. But as 
they became more cultivated, moved about more, 
and had money to spend, they began to be pur- 
chasers of small portraits and of homely landscapes 
by English artists, and their patronage afforded 
a pecuniary basis for the growth of an English school 
of painters, essentially simple, sincere, and unaffected 
in its manner of work, appealing to the instincts of 
the middle class. The pastoral landscapes of Gains- 
borough and the charming and quiet water-colours 
of Sandby depicted rural scenes which suggested, 
by the frequent introduction of buildings or of 
agricultural operations, material comfort. Portraits 
ceased to be official or merely complimentary pic- 
tures. Reynolds and Gainsborough by their portraits 
of women and children illustrate the tendency to an 
increasing dignity and appreciation of home-life, to 
the growth of woman's influence in the place where 
it is most powerful. These pictures and drawings 
were obtainable by business men at moderate prices. 
Gainsborough's prices when he went to Bath, in 1760, 
were at first five to eight guineas for a portrait. As 
he became sought after he raised them sometimes 
to forty guineas for a half-length, and to a hundred 
guineas for a full-length portrait.^ Mrs. Thrale paid 
^ " Armstrong, Life of Gainsborough," p. 87. 



176 ART COLLECTORS 

Reynolds ^^35 for a half-length portrait of Dr. Burney, 
and Wright of Derby lived on the modest amounts, 
which he received for a long series of portraits, 
every one of which was of a person of the middle 
class. -^ In brief, the growth of the middle class 
made art popular, and united it to the home. 

Affluent members of the middle class were even 
becoming collectors, sometimes with care and judg- 
ment, as when Mr. Thrale covered the walls of his 
villa at Streatham with portraits by Reynolds, some- 
times with indiscriminate eagerness, such as the 
younger Beckford showed when he filled Fonthill 
Abbey with a collection of works of art and articles of 
vertu, good, bad, and indifferent. You might in the 
beginning of the eighteenth century have found many 
splendid aristocratic mansions in which were works of 
art of priceless value brought from abroad, but you 
would seldom have found them in the merchant's 
parlour. By the end of the century circumstances 
had changed, and middle-class homes were beginning 
to absorb the works of English artists and were 
assisting in the creation of a school of painters, the 
rise of which was contemporaneous with, and influ- 
enced by, the expansion of the middle class. 

The large common sense and the moderation which 
were such excellent qualities in the ordinary affairs of 
life, degenerated, in the beginning of the century, in 
religious matters, into indifference. But by the middle 

1 "Life and Works of Joseph Wright, A.R.A.," hy William 
Bemrose, p. 118. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 177 

of this period the increasing change of ideas began to 
have its effect on the religious condition of the middle 
class. In the alliterative phrase of a divine of to-day, 
men desired deeds, not dogma. Religion could not 
remain outside the influence of the new thoughts 
which were affecting literature and art, agriculture 
and commerce, and which found their most receptive 
soil among the middle classes. The practical citizen 
of London or Manchester cared nothing for theo- 
logical controversy. He could not follow War- 
burton's involved and pedantic attacks on Deists and 
Freethinkers. This bishop might write pages on 
" The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated " ; 
he did not help the manufacturer or the lawyer to 
live better or to die happier. The majority of citizens 
had no objection to an Established Church, they 
accepted it as part of the British Constitution, and 
they did not want pamphlets to prove either its 
necessity or its origin. Polemical warfare might 
interest the minds of theologians and students, it 
was useless as a guide to daily life. But when Law 
in his " Serious Call " affirmed that it was the one 
and only business of a Christian gentleman to distin- 
guish himself by good works, and much else of the 
like kind, the plain man approved the clear common 
sense of this teaching. The peasant could not read 
the writings of Law, and most noblemen would not, 
and so the religious revival grew among the men and 
women who above all others appraised deeds and 
words at their relative value. This movement had 
12 



178 RELIGIOUS AND INDUSTRIAL CHANGE 

its exaggerations and its extremists, but in the 
main it coincided with a national need— -the desire 
on the part of the new middle class, who were 
essentially sincere, to know how " to act the wise 
and reasonable part. of a true Christian." 

The collective personal force of the middle class 
caused the religious revival and the industrial revo- 
lution to become real national movements ; ^ the peers 
could sympathise with the bishops who preached 
against enthusiasm — ^which they called fanaticism ; but 
alike in business and in religion the class below them 
appreciated energy which was directed to objects 
that it could understand. The hostility of the 
Church of England to the evangelism of Wesley and 
his followers would have been less negligible if 
it had not been contemporaneous with the immense 
increase in social and national weight of the middle 
class, which inevitably added not a little to the 
growth and to the strength of Nonconformity. 

Wesley, it should always be remembered, con- 

^ A remarkable illustration of the above statement is found in 
Birmingham. In 1772 the people of Birmingham decided, in con- 
sequence of the great want of places of divine worship in the town, 
to build two new churches, and houses for the clergy, and also to 
endow them. This project was carried through by Act of Parliament, 
and the two churches were completed by 1779. But throughout the 
proceedings the laymen of the town were the active persons. The 
foundation-stones were laid by one of the trustees, and the trustees 
appointed the clergymen. Neither bishops nor clergy appear 
from beginning to end except for the purpose of the consecration of 
the buildings. Langford, " A Century of Birmingham Life," vol. i. 
p. 205. 




John Wesley. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS 179 

servative in views and principles, whether political 
or religious, so far from being a mere emotional 
and uneducated hedgerow preacher was born of a 
sound middle-class family, educated at the Uni- 
versity of Oxford, and ordained a clergyman of 
the Established Church. His unshakeable belief in 
the words of the Bible, his straightforward religious 
principles and his practical capacity, indicated him 
as a typical middle-class man imbued with a 
fervent but well-regulated religious ardour, which 
acted as an overpowering stimulus to the exercise 
of his marvellous capacity as a man of action and 
as a man of business. Wesley found innumerable 
followers among working men, among Lancashire 
colliers and Bristol dock hands, but he also gained 
hundreds of steadfast supporters among well-to-do 
people who wanted a sound working religion. The 
middle class under his influence received the impress 
of what is now popularly called Protestantism, 
which presently produced great numbers of Non- 
conformists. This impress, stamped on the middle 
class in the eighteenth century, it has never lost, and 
the Anglicanism which marked the more vigorous life 
of the Established Church in the nineteenth century 
has had no attractions for the majority of this class. 

In the eighteenth century the middle class repre- 
sented the genius of the English people, now, for the 
first time, definitely embodied in, and exemplified 
by, one great aggregation of individuals. Hitherto 
predominant qualities had shown themselves uncer- 



i8o MIDDLE CLASS AT END OF CENTURY 

tainly, and without continuity, in persons sufficiently 
united at times of national crisis to give a national 
stamp to certain features. Now sobriety, energy, 
good sense, and love of individual freedom became 
the unmistakable characteristics of one, and at this 
time at any rate, the most increasing part of the 
nation. It was growing so large and so influential 
that its characteristics became those, in this age, 
of the people as a whole, for it already far out- 
numbered the aristocracy, and at the same time 
the artisans were not yet sufficiently numerous or 
organised to obscure, or to overwhelm, the class im- 
mediately above them. 

In fact, the general appearance of the middle class 
towards the end of the century is that of a great mass 
of prosperous, contented, and sensible persons, often 
blessed with competences — sometimes even rich — 
moral, and respectable, not altogether without for- 
mality, but who were yet without the ceremonious 
manners of the aristocracy which prevailed at the be- 
ginning of the century. Politically generally conserva- 
tive, they had liberal instincts, the result of centuries of 
constitutional struggles, which produced from among 
them political reformers. In the towns they began 
to realise the civic responsibility of daily existence, 
and to develop that capacity for honest and efficient 
municipal government which has been the most 
marked and satisfactory feature of the corporate 
life of the cities and boroughs of modern England. 
In religion unemotional and rather formal, but ready 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS i8i 

to respond to teachers such, as Wesley, who could 
indicate a practical road to salvation, they were 
pursuing in many places new social and educational 
aims. The same forces were producing men and 
women of letters who looked to their own class 
for patronage, by means of the sale of their works 
to it. We see, in fact, a peaceful evolution of a 
great class which was attaining to maturity without 
revolution, and on the whole with so little political 
or intellectual stir that the importance of the move- 
ment was difficult of realisation. 



CHAPTER XI 

The Men of the Industrial Revolution 

The industrial revolution, the most momentous 
movement in the spectacle before us, was effected 
by men of strikingly different but of powerful 
personalities, and with aims and ambitions hitherto 
scarcely known in England. Complex in character, 
its force was immense, and its results changed the 
face of the country and the relations of the several 
sections of English society. 

The accession of George I. was a striking sign 
of the completion of the fundamental political changes 
of the previous century. " 1688," it has been said, 
" is the end of a long crisis, during which the English 
people had been struggling for sixty years ; a for- 
tunate crisis, since its end gave to England what 
none of the European nations then possessed — a free 
government." As a matter of fact, however, the 
epoch of struggle did not end till 171 4, for, during 
the reign of Queen Anne, there was always a 
possibility of the return of troubled times, of the 
anti- Stuart struggle and, until a Hanoverian sover- 
eign was securely seated on the throne, the English 
people did not feel certain that the change accom- 

182 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 183 

plished in 1688 was permanent. But the accession 
of George I. was a national settlement, and from 
that moment the commencement of the indus- 
trial revolution of the eighteenth century may be 
dated. 

The indication of the permanence of the changes 
which culminated in 1688, presented by the coronation 
of a German prince, had the effect of opening the 
gates which had restrained the national energy from 
the new industrial course. In previous epochs, the 
people had been engrossed in maritime and com- 
mercial expansion, as in the times of Elizabeth ; in 
those of her successors, they were absorbed in a vital 
national struggle for domestic freedom. The moment, 
however, that it was realised that this indispensable 
object was securely achieved, the national forces 
turned into new channels ; the result was the in- 
dustrial revolution of the eighteenth century. The 
time being opportune, several causes, each reacting 
on the other, came into play, the aggregate of which, 
producing new industries and new classes of men, 
ultimately changed the balance of political power 
in England. 

Of these causes the principal were the invention 
and the improvement of machinery and its applica- 
tion to manufactures ; and this resulted not so 
much from theoretical genius, as from the practical 
mechanical cleverness of ingenious discoverers, and 
from the foresight and energy of capitalists, whose 
powers of business and capacity of administration 



i84 HOME MANUFACTURES 

enabled them to utilise commercially the new in- 
ventions. They were " the pioneers of the application 
of mechanics to industry." ^ These two classes 
contain the Men of the New Industrial Revolution 
who, by the active combination of opposite and even 
antagonistic qualities, revolutionised alike the indus- 
tries and the society of England. 

A primary result of this change in mechanical 
methods was the transformation of the domestic 
worker into the factory hand. Defoe, in his de- 
scription of Bradford (on Avon) and Trubridge 
(Trowbridge), gives a striking picture of the domestic 
manufactures of the West in the early part of the 
eighteenth century : " These towns are interspersed 
with a very great number of villages, I had almost 
said innumerable villages, hamlets, and scattered 
houses, in which, generally speaking, the spinning 
work of all this Manufacture is performed by the 
poor people ; the master clothiers, who generally 
live in the greater towns, sending out the wool 
weekly to their houses, by their servants and 
horses, and at the same time bringing back the 
yarn that they have spun and finished, which is 
then fitted for the loom." ^ 

The same traits were visible in the North. The 
Lancashire weaver worked in the country in a 
cottage surrounded by a bit of land ; his wife and 

1 Cunningham, " Growth of English Industry and Commerce," 
p. 609. 

2 Defoe, "Tour Through Great Britain," vol. ii. p. 41 (ed. 1725). 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 185 

children carded or spun. Domestic manufacturing 
and small farming were often combined — a charming 
old-world union, an idyllic scene ; but one which 
beneath its homeliness and its tranquillity hid in- 
numerable evils — abominable hygienic conditions, long 
hours of work, and unlimited child labour. 

Of the domestic system, the wool trade, " the 
great staple trade of the kingdom " in bygone days, 
affords a noticeable example. It gave employment 
to large numbers of persons, not in a single district, 
as does the cotton trade to-day, but in widely different 
parts of England — in the eastern counties, in Kent, 
in the south-eastern districts, in Somerset and Dorset, 
in the extreme West, and in Yorkshire. In them the 
cottage was the factory. Sometimes a single family 
would perform all the work, the wife and the daughters 
helped the father and the sons, sometimes workmen 
assisted who lived with the family, and who belonged 
to the same class as the master. But oftentimes the 
weaver had to go outside his own household and 
distribute his wool at other dwellings. As soon as 
the cloth was woven the weaver had himself to 
journey to the market at the nearest town. At 
Leeds the street called the Briggate was crowded by 
seven in the morning with men from the surrounding 
districts. The weaver stood before the table on which 
his cloth lay, and dealers passed along examining 
and buying the wares which had been brought in 
from the adjacent villages. 

But the small hand-worker was not solely busied 



1 86 MECHANICAL INDUSTRIES 

with his wool and his machines ; near the house 
were usually some acres of arable and pasture-land, 
the produce of which not only supported the house- 
hold, but afforded food for cows and a horse. The 
horse was part of the stock-in-trade, for on it the 
weaver rode to market, carrying his wares with him. 
Thus the land about a village near Stockport was 
divided between fifty and sixty occupiers, of whom 
not more than six or seven lived on the produce 
of their farms, every one of the others adding to 
their agricultural gains some earnings from work as 
weavers. And around Leeds there was scarcely a farmer 
who made a living from his land alone. " Agriculture 
and mechanical industries were sometimes so closely 
connected that every increase of activity in the one 
produced an equivalent diminution of it in the other. 
In winter, when field work was interrupted, the 
steady hum of the spinning-wheel was to be heard 
in every chimney-corner. At the time of harvest, 
on the other hand, the wheel stood idle, and the 
workers ceased to labour for want of thread. * From 
time immemorial,' says the preamble to an Act of 
1662, * the custom is preserved of stopping weaving 
every year during the harvest, because the spinners, 
who furnished the weavers with yarn, were all em- 
ployed in agricultural work.' " ^ 

The industrial revolution destroyed these homely 
industries, with their little groups of domestic 

1 Paul Mantoux, " La Revolution Industrielle au XVIIJe Siecle," 
p. 42 (Paris, 1906). 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 187 

workers,^ and produced a new class of capitalists who 
organised labour, employed it systematically in large 
buildings, and distributed its proceeds throughout 
the world. Men who had hitherto been concerned 
with the distribution of the results of the work of 
the mechanic had " neither improved nor directed 
that work," they were, in fact, merchants rather than 
manufacturers, and they were comparatively few 
and isolated, though often wealthy. By the evolution 
of industry they became numerous and formed a 
class, one united by common interests and dis- 
tinguished by broad general characteristics. " Les 
createurs du systeme de fabrique ont cree en meme 
temps une classe, une espece sociale nouvelle." ^ 

If, during this period of change, we observe the 
woollen and the silk trade, the iron and the pottery 
trade, and in these four are contained the four 
chief industries of England in the eighteenth 
century, two predominant features — as I have already 
indicated — are visible; inventive ingenuity in a high 
degree in some men, commercial and organizing 
power in an equally high degree in others. John 
Kay, who was born in 1704, invented, in 1733, 
the fly shuttle, " the most important improvement 
ever made in the loom," and ^ one which had mo- 
mentous consequences for the textile industry. Yet, 

^ Cunningham, " Growth of English Industry and Commerce," 
p. 616. 
2 Mantoux, p. 379. 
^ " Dictionary of National Biography " Art. John Kay. 



i88 ABRAHAM DARBY 

in spite of the success of this ingenious and famous 
invention, Kay — essentially a typical man of the 
industrial revolution — died in poverty in France. 
In 1 71 6 John Lombe made his adventurous journey 
to Italy and, at the risk of his life, brought home 
drawings of machinery which gave a striking stimulus 
to the silk trade. The inventions of Wyatt (1733-38), 
the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves (1765), the water- 
frame of Highs (1768), and the mule of Cranston 
(1779), indicate the constant and remarkable current 
of new inventions which were being produced by 
men born at the beginning of the century. 

After many years of failure, the second Abraham 
Darby, of Coalbrookdale, at length successfully (1735) 
solved the method of utilizing coal for the production 
of iron. How much is due to the previous investi- 
gations and experiments of Dud Dudley during 
the seventeenth century and of the elder Darby during 
the first years of the eighteenth century it is difficult 
exactly to say ; the final successful effort is the 
salient feature to be remembered : " At last, in 
1735, he obtained the result so often tried for. He 
remained for six days and nights near the blast furnace, 
with scarcely any sleep and taking his meals beside 
the furnace. On the evening of the sixth day, after 
more than one disappointment, the experiment suc- 
ceeded and the fusion was perfect."^ 

This momentous event in the industrial revolution, 
one so full of unforeseen consequences for the future 
^ Mantoux, p. 293. 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 189 

of England, occurred at the very time when dis- 
coveries and applications of new methods scarcely 
less important are to be seen in other than the 
iron trade. The aggregate marks with the utmost 
distinctness the unexampled industrial progress of 
the period, the opening of a new chapter in the 
development of the English people, the evolution 
of a new division of men — the industrial capitalist 
and the industrial inventor. Of these I have already 
given some examples ; but the famous combina- 
tion of Boulton and Watt is one of the most re- 
markable. The commercial daring and the sound 
judgment of the one were equalled by the patient 
ingenuity of the other, of whom the modern steam 
engine is the enduring monument. -^ 

The career of Wedgwood is another example, and 
indicates also the breadth of the movement since, 
with all his energy and capacity as a man of business, 
the basis of much of his work was artistic and he 
went for inspiration to Greek models. In 1769 he 
founded a new manufactory at some distance from 
Burslem, and called it Etruria ; to-day it is the centre 
of a well-known industrial district. The name has 
now become popular and commonplace, but it was 
chosen by Wedgwood to indicate his debt to ancient 
masters. On June 13, 1769, the inauguration of 
the new buildings took place. The scene is memor- 
able : " The throwing-room was where the company 
assembled, and here Mr. Wedgwood, divesting him- 
^ Smiles, " Lives of Boulton and Watt," p. 199. 



190 JOSIAH WEDGWOOD 

self of his coat and hat, sat down before the thrower's 
board, whilst Mr. Bentley turned the wheel. One 
of the favourite old servants made the balls of clay 
ready to his master's hand, and others stood by to 
assist. Thus environed, Mr. Wedgwood, remembering 
his old mastery in this highest province of the potter's 
art, threw with great precision six vases in the black 
basaltes body, averaging about ten inches each in 
height and five and a half in the widest part. . . . 
The body, which is of a bluish tinge of black . . . 
bears on it, painted in two shades of red, a subject 
taken from a bas-relief in Hamilton's work ' Hercules 
and his Companions in the Garden of the Hesperides.' 
The two borders are from the same source. On 
the reverse side is an inscription to the effect that 
it is the product of the first day's work at Etrurian 
Staffordshire, by Wedgwood and Bentley, and within 
the fillet above the foot are inserted the words * Artes 
Etrurise Renascuntur.' " ^ These words breathe en- 
thusiasm and idealism, and their inscription on his 
wares was a pregnant sign of the motives which 
actuated Wedgwood, as well as his contemporaries. 
The English spirit which urged Drake and his fellows 
to the Spanish main was pressing the new race on to 
more peaceful and not less momentous adventures, 
undertaken with the same courage and patience, the 
same boldness and hope, as were the voyages of 
Elizabethan explorers. We can scarcely realize 
the numerous disappointments, the depressing checks, 
1 Meteyard, " Life of Wedgwood," vol. i. p. ii2. 




JosiAH Wedgwood. 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 191 

and the clouded hopes, which darkened the careers 
of men like Wedgwood, Boulton, and Arkwright. 
When we honour the skilful inventor and the suc- 
cessful manufacturer, we forget the trials which each 
passed through, while the men who did not achieve 
their aim are lost in oblivion. 

The extent of the industrial revolution is made 
more significant by the share which Wedgwood and 
Bentley took in it and by their application of art 
to industry, for their work extended over the same 
period as the discoveries and the organization which 
changed the old order of things in the textile and 
metallurgical trades. In this change national char- 
acteristics are pre-eminent ; the modest words, 
" business capacity " conceal various qualities, 
cherished of the Anglo-Saxon race, without which 
the inventions of ingenious minds would have come 
to nothing. John Wilkinson was an example of 
the men, not inventors but watchers of inventions, 
quick to understand their practical value and to 
realize the profit to be obtained from them. It was 
he who built at Bradley, near Wolverhampton, in 
1754, the first coke furnace, constructed on the 
model of those of Coalbrookdale. In 1775 he bought 
the first steam engine to come from the workshop of 
Bcmlton and Watt. The forges at Bradley, where 
he nad been superintendent, became his property in 
1772, and he continued to enlarge them, and to 
obtain fresh foundries in South Wales and tin mines 
in Cornwall. " The whole formed a veritable king- 



192 THE FIRST SIR ROBERT PEEL 

dom, an industrial community which Wilkinson ruled 
with an energetic and autocratic hand." He coined 
his own money tokens, and these from 1787 to 1808 
circulated in the adjoining counties. The great 
ironmaster was represented on the coins in profile — 
a bourgeois and rather stout figure. Around the 
edge were inscribed the simple words : " Wilkinson, 
Ironmaster." 

The first Sir Robert Peel is yet another instance 
of the capacity of the capitalist to adapt inventions 
to manufactures. He devoted himself " to explore 
the power of mechanical combinations, particularly 
when they could be converted to the use of his own 
manufacture, and ... he introduced among his 
operatives that order, arrangement, and subdivision 
of employment which form the marked characteristics 
of the factory system." ^ 

Arkwright is a better-known example on whom 
the fame of an inventor as well as that of a captain of 
industry has rested. But his celebrity as a man of 
action is enhanced because it is evident that he was 
not himself an inventor, but only quick to take ad- 
vantage of inventions of men less capable than he 
of utilizing them in practice. Beginning life as an 
apprentice to a barber and wigmaker at Preston, 
he died extremely wealthy in 1792, having done 
more, perhaps, than any other man of his age to 
apply inventions to practical industry, and to organize 
labour. It is now clear that for a long time he was 
1 Cooke, " Life of Peel," vol. i. p. 6. 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 193 

mistakenly regarded as the inventor of the water- 
frame, which was in fact the invention of Highs, or 
Hayes, as he is sometimes called. This, however, 
though very important, was only one of the inven- 
tions which Arkwright utilized ; others followed, 
and of each he took full advantage. " He is not 
an inventor ; at the most he arranged, combined, 
and utilized the inventions of others without the 
least scruple. The praises lavished on his memory 
by thoughtless admirers seem now slightly misplaced : 
it was too much to compare him first to Newton and 
then to Napoleon, and it was foolish to quote him 
as an example to prove that capitalist power is founded 
purely on personal merit and industrious honesty. 
But it can be said of Arkwright that he succeeded. 
He was the first to turn to account those in- 
ventions of which he was not the author ; he was 
the first to group them into a system. To find the 
capital necessary to found his establishments, and to 
form and dissolve the partnerships which he made 
the successive instruments of his fortune, required 
an extraordinary talent for business and a singular 
mixture of cleverness, perseverance, and audacity. 
He had to display unusual energy and activity in 
the founding of large factories, the recruiting of 
hands, in the training of them for the new work, 
as in the establishment of strict discipline in the 
workshops. It is he who created the modern factory 
after the incomplete attempts or failures of the 
brothers Lombe, of Wyatt, and of Lewis Paul. In 

13 



194 ARKWRIGHT 

him the new type of the manufacturer became incar- 
nate, differing from engineers and merchants whose 
principal characteristics he borrows, but adds to 
them those of his own character as a business pro- 
moter, an organizer of development, and a leader 
of men. He represents a social class and business 
administration \regime economique], 

"His name will be for ever inseparable from the 
origin of mechanical industries. Every factory in 
the counties of Lancashire and Derby at the end of 
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth 
centuries was constructed on the model of his. ' We 
all had our eyes fixed on him,' said Sir Robert Peel. 
He knew it, and seemed to endeavour to give an 
example of an ardent worker and a boundless am- 
bition. He worked incessantly, spending a part of 
his nights at it ; being constantly called away per- 
sonally to superintend his numerous establishments, 
he worked on his way in his coach, which was always 
driven at a great pace. His schemes were always 
gigantic. One day he remarked, * If I live long enough, 
I shall be rich enough to refund the National Debt.' " ^ 
It would be impossible to sum up the place of 
Arkwright in the industrial revolution more truly 
and more forcibly than has been done in the passage 
which I have ventured to translate. He represents 
the energy and the indomitable courage of the 
industrial explorer, and he is a type of the modern 
man of business. Arkwright was not the first English- 
^ Mantoux, " La Revolution Industrielle au XVIIF Si^cle," p. 227. 



THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 195 

man to show energy and capacity in the conduct 
of commercial affairs. The mediaeval Jack of New- 
bury is a traditional figure, the weaver of Berkshire 
probably had most of the qualities which tended 
to the success of Richard Arkwright. But the former 
was an isolated figure, a man of peace in a warlike 
time ; the latter was typical, an actor in a great 
movement, one of a class, a figure on a crowded 
scene. Many lesser but similar figures followed 
him in his own age, who, if they loomed somewhat 
less largely before the eyes of the world, were not less 
capable of success, each differing in individual qualities, 
some with high aspirations, others aiming at wealth 
alone. But it is not with the individual that I am here 
concerned ; it is with men who form a collective 
body, living factors in a momentous national move- 
ment, in a series of events more important than 
great battles. 



CHAPTER XII 

General Influence of the Men of the Industrial 
Revolution 

The leaders of the Industrial Revolution were none 
of them men of one idea ; they had a wide out- 
look, they were essentially sane and practical, and 
in many ways, outside of their own business, they 
interested themselves in projects which tended to 
the progress and prosperity of the community. One 
may take as an instance the subject of communi- 
cation between localities. Before 1759 there was 
not a single canal in England. By 1777 there 
were eleven separate systems of new artificial water- 
ways, which were mostly due to the initiative and to 
the pecuniary aid of new chiefs of industry. Wedg- 
wood and Bentley, for example, were indefatigable 
in pushing through the project of a canal from the 
Mersey to the Trent. Partly also these under- 
takings were the results of the enlightened views of 
some of the larger landowners, especially the second 
Duke of Bridgewater and Lord Gower. As in the case 
of the textile industries, there was an inventor, and 
behind him the indispensable capitalist and organizer ; 
the brain of Brindley and the money and energy of 

196 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 197 

the Duke of Bridgewater ^ and Wedgwood, were some 
of the factors in the development of the forces of 
communication. This should never be regarded as 
something separate from the evolution of particular 
industries. The basis was the same, and it was one 
of the factors in a complex national development just 
as much as were the discoveries of Highs and the 
organization of Arkwright ; each factor reacted on 
the other, and each forms part of the rise of modern 
industries. 

English canals in the latter half of the eighteenth 
century were, as means of communication, of the 
first importance ; they came into existence to meet 
a national want, and their decadence commenced 
when a more rapid system of locomotion, in the shape 
of railways, supplied the requirements of traders 
and manufacturers. Canals fell into the hands of, or 
under the power of, railway companies, chiefly because 
the primary object of their existence had ceased. 
If we realize their historical commencement, it may 
be doubted whether they can ever be again of sub- 
stantial use and importance in a country of the small 
size of Great Britain. 

The improvement of the highways of the country 
was also a result of the demand for more convenient 
communication in the industrial districts. Practical 
men had long complained of the miserable con- 
ditions of English highways. " At Knutsford," wrote 
Arthur Young, in 1768, " it is impossible to describe 
^ Smile?, " Lives of the Engineers," vol. i. p. 235. 



198 MEANS OF COMMUNICATION 

these infernal roads in terms adequate to their de- 
serts." The road to Newcastle-under-Lyme " is 
in general a paved causeway, as narrow as can be 
conceived, and cut into perpetual holes, some of 
these two feet deep measured on the level ; a more 
dreadful road cannot be imagined." But this was 
not the only highway of which this ubiquitous and 
observant traveller was forced to complain. The 
conditions were equally bad all over England. 

Nor was Arthur Young the only person to note 
this fact or to desire the improvement of local high- 
ways. Complaints of them were common. Farmers 
and peasants who were entrusted with their care 
" know not," wrote a contemporary reformer, " how 
to lay a foundation, nor make the proper slopes and 
drains ; they pour a heap of stones loose into a swampy 
hole which make the best of their way to the centre 
of the earth : " remonstrances and presentments 
signify nothing ; the eloquence of my lords the 
judges has never prevailed." ^ In the past some 
public-spirited men had left bequests for the improve- 
ment of the roads in the districts where they had 
lived. But the majority preferred bad roads and 
freedom rather than passable highways under ^"^ the 
management of the State, and hitherto there had 
never been any collective force capable of pushing 
on the improvement of English highways. 

The necessary impetus came with the industrial 
revolution of the eighteenth century. The leaders 

^ Essajr on " Roads," Gentleman^ s Magazine (1752), vol, xxii. p. 519. 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 199 

of it were not the men to put up with the wretched 
and inconvenient tracks which had hitherto served 
the purposes of highways. The Government, too, 
was friendly. The rebellion of 1745 had been made 
more dangerous by the difficulty arising from bad 
roads of moving troops to meet the Young Pre- 
tender. But this, though no doubt a factor favourable 
to the more rapid improvement of the highways, was 
not the main force. The urgent necessity of good 
roads for the purposes of trade, and the natural 
energy now turned into this channel, were the 
driving forces of the movement. 

When men like Wedgwood began to give their 
thoughts and time to the subject, the efforts of 
individuals such as Dr. Borlase in Cornwall, and the 
Reverend James Bentham in the Fen district, had a 
public opinion to back them up, and they ceased to 
be voices crying in the wilderness. It is not surpris- 
ing therefore that between 1760 and 1774 four hundred 
and fifty- two Acts relating to roads passed through 
Parliament. Many turnpike trusts were established, 
and many of the chief highways were taken out of 
the charge of the parishes and were made fairly 
sound. It cannot, however, be said that, speaking 
generally, English main roads have ever been first- 
rate, and their management has always been char- 
acterized by a want of system and of technical 
knowledge. 

But the movement which is summed up in the 
mere enumeration of a series of ^cts of Parliament i|i 



200 LOCAL FAIRS 

regard to roads had immense general influence. It 
enabled the pottery of Staffordshire, the hardware 
of Birmingham, and the importations of Liverpool 
to be conveyed from one side of England to the other, 
and it placed individuals in the North in personal 
communication with those in the South. It enabled 
the countryman to visit London and the Londoner 
to go into the provinces. Without the impetus 
arising from the industrial renaissance, men might 
have waited long for better roads, and the increasing 
homogeneity of all classes might have been delayed. 
Perhaps another and more systematic form of road 
management might have been evolved. As it was, 
the efforts of the industrial magnates in these several 
parts made the management of the trunk highways 
more efficient, though local management was still 
left as the basis of the highway system. 

Easier communication between town and town, 
both by land and water, thenceforth began to under- 
mine the local fairs, which had hitherto formed so 
marked a feature in the economic condition of 
England. A periodical fair in a local town, such as 
the great fair at Stourbridge in Cambridgeshire, which 
lasted from the middle of August to the middle of 
September, the four considerable annual " marts " 
at Lynn, Boston, Gainsborough, and Beverley, and 
smaller fairs in the more important towns of a district, 
were simple and primitive methods of trade. They 
implied a cessation of intercourse between buyer 
and seller, between the maker of cloth and the buyer 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 201 

of it, for the greater part of the year. Sufficient for 
the requirements of a domestic system of manufacture, 
they were inadequate for the needs of a more 
elaborate, and highly capitalized, system. They were 
important occurrences in the places where they were 
held, made as much of as religious festivals or celebra- 
tions of national events ; they entered largely into 
the social life of localities, and they created a special 
class of travelling merchants who moved from one 
market town and fair to another with long droves 
of pack-horses. This pre-revolutionary view, pic- 
turesque and somewhat archaic, gradually fades away 
as the industrial revolution gains in power. As 
the eighteenth century closes, the old order changes, 
and, under the pressure of the powerful and com- 
plex influences which I have indicated, we look 
on a wholly different scene. 

An impartial historical observer in after-years 
finds it hard to lay hold of cardinal facts, and 
to ascertain the main forces of progress. It is even 
more difficult for contemporaries to appreciate the 
effect of the actions of men of their own age on the 
future condition of their country. It is not, there- 
fore, surprising that, when we read the letters, diaries, 
and memoirs of the eighteenth century, we are as- 
tonished at the small attention which is given to the 
details of the industrial progress of the time. That 
attention was, of course, more difficult then than 
now, for, in an age of bad roads, of scarce letters, 
and of occasional newspapers, it w^s impossible for 



202 INVENTIONS AND BUSINESS 

an observer in London, however curious, to note 
all that occurred in other parts of England. 

Yet, under the stimulus of mechanical invention 
and commercial power, the old order was steadily 
changing in the provincial towns in the rural 
districts, and the foundations of society were in 
process of revolution. The two united forces — 
inventive genius and business energy — were causing 
the radical changes in English agriculture which took 
place in the eighteenth century. Some alteration 
would undoubtedly have occurred without these two 
factors, for general progress made the communal 
system of husbandry more and more unsuitable. But 
when Arthur Young compared large farms to large 
factories, and when he says that the closer the system 
of farming is brought to the system of manufacture 
the better, we at once see the influence which indus- 
trial progress had on the minds of many intelligent 
agriculturists and great proprietors. It is evidence 
(one fact among many) indicating a national change,^ 
one which had momentous consequences, not the 
least of which was the alteration which it effected 
in the condition of the peasantry, as will be de- 
scribed on a later page. 

The great volume of national energy which in 
this period was working a peaceful revolution could 
not be confined within a single channel. It might 
affect manufactures more than agriculture, but it 

^ Cunningham, " Growtji of English Industry and Commerce," 
p.613. 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 203 

was bound also to show its influence on that pursuit. 
When Lord Townshend, in 1730, renounced the career 
of statesman for that of scientific farmer, and when 
other aristocratic landowners, Lord Rockingham at 
Wentworth, the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, and 
others of less importance, to some extent followed 
his example, it was a sign that a current of national 
energy was not only stimulating a particular industry, 
but also that, under its pressure, the minds of the 
nobility were being turned to new, and hitherto 
unthought-of, subjects. 

At the same time, the results of the industrial 

revolution had, apart from the question of national 

force, a distinct effect on agriculture and the condition 

of the agricultural labourer. The enclosure of the 

common lands and the permanent division of the 

" open fields," separated many of those who had 

hitherto been attached to it from the land and 

from particular rural districts. These men were 

at once drawn towards the new centres of industry, 

and from that moment began a rural migration 

which has not yet ceased. The admirable French 

author to whose work reference has already been 

made, appositely cites under this head a passage 

from a work, written in 1758, in which the writer 

describes the continual movement from rural parishes 

to market towns, and from these to the capital, 

and how a crowd of men, born in the country, 

chose new homes in the towns, and especially in 

those which were the seat of important indus- 



204 CHANGES IN PLACES 

tries. " L'industrie, c'est en effet, pour ces milliers 
de travailleurs qui ont perdu tout ou partie de leurs 
ressources habituelles, le seul debouche possible. Le 
travail que les champs leur refusent, ils vont le de- 
mander aux ateliers." ^ 

Without new factories and workshops these men 
must have continued to live on the land ; but, as 
things were, the factory at once absorbed men 
from the village, and drew them from the land. 
The factory grew up, not as now, in a populous 
place, but in a quiet rural village, which was soon 
transformed into an urban district. Thus Tyldesley, 
to the south of Bolton, consisted, in 1780, of two 
farms and eight or nine cottages ; by 179S, it had 
increased to a hundred and sixty-two houses, a 
church, and contained nine hundred and seventy- 
six inhabitants.^ Of necessity new industries re- 
quired hands, and farms and fields were the only 
recruiting grounds, so that, if there had been no 
agricultural change taking place, the new and better- 
paid employment would assuredly have absorbed large 
portions of the rural population. These men of the 
Industrial Revolution were not penniless, for yeomen 
whose small farms were absorbed in larger holdings 
were able to leave their old homes with a little capital 
in their pockets. Like the best of the modern emi- 
grants, they departed with the hope, not only of 

1 Mantoux, p. 174. Citing J. Massie, " A Plan for the Establish- 
ment of Charity Houses," p. 99. 
^ Mantoux, p. 370, 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 205 

obtaining employment, but also of enlarging their 
small fortunes in the new manufacturing world. 

This change, beginning in one century and ex- 
tending into a succeeding century, indicates that 
the townward migration of the agriculturist was 
primarily economic, and that the cause of the agri- 
cultural exodus was neither shortage of land nor 
the shortcomings of landlords, but the creation and 
growth of a new and immense industrial system which 
destroyed the old dual and combined agricultural 
and manufacturing systems. That the enclosure of 
commons and open fields and the enlargement of 
farms tended to the same exodus there is no doubt, 
just as at the present time increased facilities of land 
purchase or hire would have a tendency to cause a 
certain number of competent men to continue to 
seek a living by agricultural work in rural districts. 
Nothing can alter the momentous elementary fact 
that the industrial revolution was also an agricultural 
revolution, and that, however desirable and admirable 
legislation may be to induce and to enable men to 
till the soil without disturbance and under fair con- 
ditions, it cannot bring back the pre- eighteenth 
century dual system, under which varied domestic 
manufactures were a strong prop to agriculture, and 
to agriculture not in one district of the kingdom, 
but in every quarter of it, and in most dissimilar 
soils. Domestic manufactures not only brought 
money into the family till, they also gave stability 
to agriculture, and reduced its risks and uncertainties, 



2o6 MOVEMENT OF POPULATION 

for poor harvests could to some extent be counter- 
balanced by industrial labour. 

The revolution, therefore, tended not only to the 
creation of large urban districts, where facilities, 
such as the proximity of coal mines for manufactures 
were most obtainable, it also made the rural districts 
more purely agricultural, diminishing their popula- 
tion almost in proportion to the increase of the urban 
population. In a word, it settled the face of modern 
England. In 1700 the most densely populated parts 
of the kingdom extended from the Bristol Channel 
eastwards to the coast of Suffolk, the county of Wilts 
having, outside the London area, a primary place in 
this zone. In half a century these features were 
altered. Lancashire now began to show a con- 
siderable density of population, and the increase in 
the West Riding of Yorkshire was marked. By 1801 
the country, as exhibited on a population map, 
had reached its modern condition. The new manu- 
facturing counties were becoming thickly populated, 
and covered by large towns ; while counties like 
Sussex, which had hitherto supported factories and 
farms, became purely agricultural. 

The same causes inevitably tended to change in the 
fiscal condition of England. The industrial revolution 
was unquestionably the primary cause of the move- 
ment from protection to free trade. The necessity 
for the repeal of the Corn Laws commenced when 
the combined manufacturing and agricultural systems 
began to be replaced by the new factory system, and 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 207 

it shows that those who in recent years have advocated 
a return to protection, so far from moving with the 
times, are even more antiquated in their theories 
than is often supposed. The futility of their effort 
is apparent when the observer notes that whereas 
before the industrial revolution there was a com- 
munity in large districts of England capable at once 
of carrying on industrial work and of supplying its 
own necessaries of life, after that memorable event the 
industrial centres were so populous that the purely 
agricultural districts were unable to support them. A 
change, therefore, in the fiscal system of England was 
a certain and a direct result of the change from the 
old manufacturing order to the new. 

But the old system, which began to disappear to- 
wards the middle of the eighteenth century, was 
not, any more than the new, a Utopia. Each had 
its special merits and defects. Complaints of small 
pay and of too long hours were heard before, as after, 
the industrial revolution, and the imperfections of 
society were visible then, as now. It is not relevant 
to endeavour to estimate and compare the relative 
happiness of workers under the old and new systems ; 
it is sufficient to show, in a few words, the immense 
social change produced by the industrial revolution 
of the eighteenth century. This was not less among 
the middle class than among the artisans and labourers 
of the kingdom. The yeoman was replaced by the 
master manufacturer, who presently found his way 
into Parliament, often, as in the case of the first Sir 



2o8 CHANGE IN OWNERSHIP OF LAND 

Robert Peel, who became a member of Parliament 
in 1790, as a sound Conservative. Sometimes he 
became a landowner, sometimes even a peer, or his 
family married into the peerage. 

The industrial revolution, by the fortunate circum- 
stances of the English constitution, while it changed 
society personally, actually fortified this existing 
constitution, and, by uniting it more closely to the 
body of the people, prevented a rapid decline in the 
power of the nobility. A few merchants had hereto- 
fore from time to time become landowners, but the 
industrial revolution enlarged and immensely strength- 
ened the connection between the proprietary interest 
in land and the capitalist interest in manufactures. 
Its results in this respect were exactly the reverse of 
those of the contemporaneous revolution in France. 
It was thus politically not a revolution at all, for 
though it introduced personal changes, it did not 
alter the basis of the national system of government 
or of land tenure, and became in fact a conservative 
element in the evolution of English society. The 
most striking political result was the Reform Act of 
1832 ; but, though this was a step towards a more 
democratic government, it did not affect the estab- 
lished order of the Constitution. 

The first Sir Robert Peel is an example of the 
transformation of the yeoman. His father was one 
of those men, partly yeoman, partly domestic manu- 
facturer, from whom the new body of manufacturers, 
the chiefs of industry, the mainstay of the up- 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 209 

springing middle class, were recruited. It was largely 
in their forefathers that the indomitable and calm 
courage, the patience, and the perseverance which 
characterized the soldiers of Cromwell were found. 
They lived habitually a life of toil, their physique, as 
befitted countrymen, was strong ; they were intel- 
ligent in mind and energetic in character. They 
were the very men to carry into practical effect the 
ingenious inventions of those who wanted qualities 
necessary for commercial success. 

Joshua Fielden was yet another example. He, too, 
cultivated the paternal acres, and worked at the 
machinery installed in his house, going sometimes 
to sell his wares at Halifax. Jedediah Strutt, the 
son of an agriculturist and stocking-maker near Derby, 
was also an industrial pioneer. 

Examples, however interesting, cannot do more 
than arouse the active imagination which is required 
to realize the great movement on the scene before 
us. Hitherto there had been no commercial homo- 
geneity. Men of business had been few, and had 
been isolated, and they had had little political 
weight except in the city of London. Now, the 
growth of industrialism in the North and in the Mid- 
lands of England was producing a class which was 
ready to act and to work together in the common 
interest. The spirit of English political freedom 
extended to another sphere, and the habits of cen- 
turies affected industrial movements : " C'est par 
un mouvement tout naturel, et conformement k 
H 



210 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

d'innombrables precedents que les grands industriels 
furent amenes a se concerter en vue de certaines 
demarches pratiques." The industrial revolution in 
its results was thus a natural sequel of the constitu- 
tional and religious conflicts of past years, and the 
political capacity of the people trained by centuries of 
usage, now adapted itself to industrial objects. No- 
where in these changes do we see the least trace of State 
initiative or of State management. Everywhere the 
individual Englishman is the sole factor, at times and 
under some circumstances strengthened by common 
action. 

From these men of the industrial revolution of 
the eighteenth century largely sprang a new middle 
class. Men of business and professional men had 
hitherto been isolated; there had been no corporate 
social feeling. The number of well-to-do families 
produced by the new movement, at once intelligent 
and energetic, not only increased self-respect and 
reasonable pride but gave as well a more intellec- 
tual stamp to the middle class. Burke was one of 
the few who noted the change, if he did not seize 
all its significance. He wrote to Mrs. Crewe : 

" What you say of all the squires, especially those 
of the second and third class of fortunes, is fatally 
but too true. They are inferior to the merchant and 
manufacturing castes. It is a pity. This in itself 
is a woeful revolution; for that class of men were 
formerly the hope, the pride, and the strength of the 
country. They are infinitely reduced in their numbers, 



THE MEN OF THE REVOLUTION 211 

and if those who remain are reduced too in other 
respects, it is a bad story." ^ 

Johnson, when he visited Birmingham and passed 
through Boulton's warehouse saw nothing more 
than a shop full of interesting objects. He did not 
perceive that it was evidence of the industrial birth 
of a new social class. And whilst Horace Walpole 
chronicled the daily doings of fine gentlemen and 
ladies in London, this great movement and these 
unobtrusive individuals were altering the very society 
of which he was an interested observer. The im- 
portance, however, of the movement and of the 
men was nowhere less appreciated than in the West 
End of London, to which the gossip of clever diarists 
and letter- writers has given an undue prominence. 
That society had its remarkable and significant 
characteristics ; but the future of England was being 
daily moulded, less by politicians at Westminster and 
by wits in St. James's Street, than by a new class 
which was working perseveringly and energetically 
among the factories of Lancashire and the Mid- 
lands — the Men of the Industrial Revolution. 

1 Burke to Mrs. Crewe, November 7, 1796, "Works" (Ed. 1852), 
ii. p. 317. 



CHAPTER XIII 

The New Provincial Citizen 

The New Provincial Citizen was the result in another 
sphere of the same causes which produced the Men 
of the Industrial Revolution who were described in 
preceding chapters. 

From the middle of the eighteenth century the New 
Provincial Citizen is a figure of the first importance 
on the scene. Neither man of letters nor politician, 
the details of his life were not such as to make him 
famous, and the story of his deeds must be sought 
for in obscure local biographies and records. A tire- 
some toil, involving the collection of many isolated 
and apparently insignificant facts in the course of 
comparatively humble lives is needful if we would 
obtain some definite conception of this particular 
Englishman. His life was in fact so modest and so 
non-political that one cannot feel surprised if neither 
his contemporaries nor his successors appreciated 
either the remarkable significance or the power of 
this man as an element in the social movement of 
his time. 

Yet the New Provincial Citizen began a new era 
in English municipal history by showing his possession 

212 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 213 

of civic virtue, by an active, patient, and unostentatious 
well-doing for the public good. One of the impressive 
and rapidly increasing middle class, among the 
Englishmen of the eighteenth century he is remarkable, 
because, in the first place, he personified a permanent 
change in English ideals, and next, because he is as 
striking a contrast to the Londoner, as to his country 
neighbours who were for the most part still stupid 
and ignorant. The inhabitant of the metropolis was 
already becoming noticeable for that want of local 
public spirit which has ever since been characteristic 
of him at the very time that the new provincial citizen, 
by reason of his provincialism with its clear limitations, 
was every day showing himself to be a better citizen. 
His mind and efforts were concentrated on the affairs 
of his own town. Around the city of London, 
which was losing its individuality as a self-governing 
commercial community, and which in past times had 
exhibited commercial energy united to civic pride, 
was springing up an enormous and ill-assorted town 
with divergent interests, whose inhabitants were 
growing up without the feeling of citizenship. 

At this moment, when the civic life of London was 
growing weaker, important towns — especially Birming- 
ham and Manchester — were coming into existence 
in the provinces ; every enlargement of their area 
stimulated the public spirit of a section of their 
people, and the increase of their wealth was followed 
by an increase in the civic responsibility of leading citi- 
zens. Behind them, if they were comprised in the new 



214 THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 

manufacturing communities, there did not lie centuries 
of town life. The mediaeval boroughs had some 
corporate life when the new eighteenth-century towns 
were mere villages and hamlets/ and for the most 
part these were still almost unorganized or organized 
only on primitive unincorporated systems. The new 
citizen looked, therefore, entirely to the future ; he 
was uninfluenced by the conservatism of a famous 
past, and, at the moment at which we are surveying 
the scene, he was essentially the man of the immediate 
future, the maker of England for the next hundred 
years. 

The satisfactory growth of the new towns, based, 
as it was, on ideals, and directed to objects, unknown 
to the inhabitants of mediaeval boroughs, was im- 
possible without energy and capacity on the part of 
their people. Their reputation in the future depended 
on the qualities of their citizens, not on historic fame. 
The Industrial Revolution, produced by inventive 
genius and commercial energy, was the most potent 
cause of the growth of the new communities, and it 
changed and enlarged the character of older places. 
The new manufacturer and man of business was thus 
in a large measure the new citizen, and he brought to 
his duties as a citizen the same practical qualities 

1 Even in the eighteenth century some of the new towns were 
regarded as little better than large villages. Thus Dr. William 
Stukely described Manchester in his " Itinerarium Curiosum," 1724, 
as " The most rich, populous, and busy village in England." (Axon, 
" Annals of Manchester," p. 78.) 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 215 

which he showed as a man of affairs. It was his 
ambition to unite success in business to a whole- 
some influence on the public life of the community 
in which he lived, to direct civic energy to various 
forms of public benefit; the establishment of schools, 
the creation and management of hospitals and similar 
institutions, the improvement of highways and streets 
and of the postal service, the building of churches, 
of chapels, and of libraries — to every object which 
tended to the happiness and health of the people. 

In every one of the growing towns, and in some 
of the older and more famous cities, groups of pro- 
vincial citizens — keenly conscious of the shortcomings 
of the age, themselves for the most part self-educated 
— ^with more or less energy and more or less success 
were to be seen throughout the last half of the century 
exerting themselves for these and similar objects. The 
pious founder and benefactor figures, it is true, in the 
long history of every English town; but he was an 
isolated personage, and his good intentions were 
usually shown by a gift of money or lands on his 
death-bed. But the new provincial citizen evi- 
denced his civic virtues in his lifetime, and chiefly by 
collective action. 

Humphrey Chetham, at the end of the seventeenth 
century, devoting his surplus income in the very last 
years of his life to the maintenance of poor boys, and 
leaving handsome legacies for the foundation and 
upkeep of a library and a hospital which have long 
been famous in Manchester, is a less admirable figure 



2i6 RALPH ALLEN AND ROBERT RAIKES 

than Mathew Boulton towards the close of the eigh- 
teenth century, in the prime of life, amidst a multitude 
of private and public affairs, undertaking the irksome 
but useful work of treasurer of the Birmingham 
dispensary. One represents the benevolence of the 
Middle Ages, which was primarily religious and selfish, 
the other the more altruistic ideals of the modern 
citizen. Self-defence and self-aggrandisement shown 
on the town council and in the guild were the object 
of mediaeval collective action, but the joint action of 
the provincials of the eighteenth century tend to more 
unselfish purposes to the good of the whole community, 
either by means of municipal, or philanthropic, labour. 
Ralph Allen of Bath — of whom I have already 
spoken — the patron and friend of men of letters, 
alderman, philanthropist, and postal reformer, rich, 
charitable, energetic, and self-made, is an admirable 
example of the new provincial citizen who was not 
an inhabitant of the new manufacturing towns. 
He was improving the moral and sanitary condition of 
Bath by personal exertion and liberal gifts ^ not 
long before Robert Raikes, the affluent and energetic 
journalist and newspaper proprietor of Gloucester, 
was in his own ancient city reforming the prisons, 
establishing an infirmary and a course of elementary 
secular and religious education on the Sunday. ^ 

1 Peach, " The Life and Times of Ralph Allen," p. 6s . 

2 Raikes is called the founder of Sunday schools. Children had 
been taught on Sundays before 1780 ; his real merit was in arranging 
for the systematic teaching of the children of Gloucester in secular 
and religious subjects on a day when they were idle. There was 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 217 

The tasks of the provincial citizen were essentially 
practical, one may even say humdrum ; all his work 
was of a quiet and unsensational kind. It was not 
based on abstract theories, but throughout it there 
was apparent a clear recognition of the right of 
every human being to have an opportunity of a 
decent and of a happy existence, and a perception of 
civic duty — of active endeavour for the improvement 
of the community as a whole. In the movement 
which the citizen now initiated he was left free by 
the central government to work out his own and his 
neighbours' municipal salvation, and it was partly 
for this reason that the general political temperature 
was so low in the eighteenth century, and that the 
rising provincial citizen was politically contented and 
not seldom politically conservative. For his chief 
interest in parliamentary affairs was concerned with 
measures which affected him in his business and his 
locality, with a Fustian or a Turnpike Bill. It 
was because the central government left him alone in 
regard to such matters, and was not unwilling to 
listen to his suggestions if a measure affected him 

then no proper elementary education on week-days : Raikes's schools 
were not merely collections of children for a few Bible lessons for half 
an hour, they were the pioneers of English elementary education. 
In Liverpool in 1784 " a group of Sunday schools was to be started, 
the children were to go to school at one o'clock every Sunday, and to 
be kept till evening comes on. They were to be taught to read and 
write, and as soon as they could read well to be taken to church. 
Somewhat modified, the scheme was carried out on a large scale, and 
it formed the first beginning of popular education in Liverpool." 
(Muir, " History of Liverpool," p. 287.) 



2i8 SOCIAL AND MUNICIPAL REFORMERS 

locally, that he was not hy any means dissatisfied with 
the existing system. His mind and his time were 
occupied with local affairs, and it was not until he 
had set his municipal house to some extent in order 
that he awoke to the need of the political changes 
which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832, the 
repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and the 
abolition of protection when nearly half the nineteenth 
century had run its course. 

The leading citizen of the eighteenth century 
outside the capital, whether an inhabitant of a new 
town in the North or of an old and flourishing city 
in the West, was frequently a social and municipal 
reformer, and was content for the time being to 
occupy himself outside his business hours — for he 
was essentially a man of business — with these matters. 
His reforms now seem exceedingly elementary and 
simple, but we perceive that the man was an extra- 
ordinarily important element in the evolution of 
English society the moment we realise what his 
ideals were. He represents a moral force uncon- 
nected with a church or a creed, the outcome of the 
traditions and of the evolution of the English people 
during several centuries, and he is himself the 
child of a union of unprecedented freedom with 
equally unprecedented industrial opportunities. In a 
country with a centralised administration, and without 
local freedom, he could never have existed, and one 
may say that he would have been impossible without 
the English political temperament. This temperament 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 219 

was the result of the political growth of the English 
people, of gradual progress, and of freedom gained 
bit by bit. And his actions at this time tended not 
only to the increase of individuality and of personal 
responsibility in public affairs, but inevitably also to 
certain definite political consequences which resulted 
eventually in changes in the English Constitution. 
They were delayed by the French Revolution, which 
retarded the efforts of Liberal citizens by reason of 
the fear of revolutionary change produced in the 
minds of the great mass of moderate men by the 
excesses of the French Republicans. Still, the pro- 
vincial citizen, when he had become his own master 
in his own city, would not afterwards put up with 
another master in national affairs. He was so imbued 
with common sense, however, that as long as he 
was left free to manage his local business, he was 
in no hurry to alter the Constitution. He was 
so little of a theorist, so satisfied to carry out changes 
under existing conditions of local government, that 
he sometimes went so far as to be content with an 
imperfect administrative system if his industrial 
initiative was left unfettered. ^ 

^ Thomas Walker, one of the most energetic of Manchester mer- 
chants, was, in 1790, elected borough reeve of Manchester, and, with 
two constables, was appointed actually to govern the town. In 
1794 he wrote, " I think I could show that the town of Manchester 
owes much of its wealth and importance to its unincorporate char- 
acter. It has been observed with great truth that towns where 
manufactures are most flourishing are seldom bodies corporate, 
commerce requiring universal encouragement instead of exclusive 



220 IMPROVEMENT OF THE PEOPLE 

Contemporaneously with a desire to better the 
condition of his fellows came a wish to improve 
himself in co-operation with his friends, and so the 
new citizen helped to found literary and philo- 
sophical institutes and societies, book clubs, circu- 
lating libraries, and debating societies, such as the 
Robin Hood Free Debating Society and the Amicable 
Debating Society, which were established in Birming- 
ham in 1774.^ Reading and discussion thus became 
by the end of the century common pastimes of the 
intelligent provincial citizen, creating a new mental 
and intellectual atmosphere which was a marked 
advance over the prevailing tone of previous years. 
A book club or a debating society — almost trivial as 
they now seem to us — once established in a provincial 
town, its influence was in the eighteenth century 
incomparably greater than that of the same kind of 
body in modern times. An urban community was 
sufficiently small to be affected as a whole by the 
intellectual influence of a group of prosperous, in- 
telligent, and earnest men. 

The provincial citizen had his theatre, as well 
as his books and his discussions. In this respect 
the difficulty of locomotion was for him a piece 
of good fortune, for it caused every considerable 
town to have its resident company of actors who, 

privileges to the natives and freemen of a particular district." — " A 
Review of some Political Events which have Occurred in Manchester 
in the Last Five Years," p. 23. 
^ Langford, " A Century of Birmingham Life," p. 239. 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 221 

from time to time, moved away to adjacent towns 
if there were any of sufficient importance in proximity 
to their own head-quarters, but who were mainly 
resident in one centre, giving the citizens a per- 
manent place of rational amusement.-^ The same 
causes which contributed to a permanent provincial 
theatre influenced art, and the provincial citizen 
who had means was becoming a patron of painters, 
in whom, if they chanced to live in his own town or 
district, he took a local pride. In London the artist 
depended on a more varied circle of patrons — on the 
aristocracy more than on the middle class, but the 
local painter subsisted chiefly on commissions from 
the provincial citizen and from the local magnate of 
the country-side. Mediaeval amusements, such as 
bull-baiting and dog-fighting, died hard, and there 
were many of the provincial citizens who did not 
scruple to indulge in such pastimes ; but these were 
steadily ceasing to have the attraction which they 
once possessed, and they existed under increasing 
criticism and protest from the new citizen. 

Out-of-doors, the new townsman was in a fortunate 
position. If he were wealthy, he sometimes had his 
country-house at no great distance from the town; 
but even if he lived within the limits of the town, he 
had his garden with its flowers, its bowling-alley, and 
its summer-house in which not a little time was spent, 
and which was sometimes so elaborate as to be a 

^ " The company at Norwich used to go from time to time to Great 
Yarmouth." Palmer, " Perlustration of Great Yarmouth," p. 352. 



222 STRENUOUS LIVES 

miniature dwelling. He was able, through his increas- 
ing affluence, and owing to better roads, to pay a 
visit to Bath or to Tunbridge Wells, to Matlock or 
to Cheltenham which became popular in the North 
and the Midlands. If he were more energetic than 
his fellows, he enjoyed a tour in some part of 
England, and he liked especially to visit famous houses 
in which picture galleries, filled with examples of 
Old Masters gathered in more than one Grand 
Tour, appealed to his rising appreciation of art. 
Rivers as yet unpolluted gave him an opportunity 
to angle near his home, and in the Midlands and the 
North the new citizen was often a keen fisherman. 
But he was not a fox-hunter, and race-meetings were 
as yet chiefly patronized by the country gentry, and 
by the inhabitants of the old-fashioned country towns, 
who had little in common with the new citizen. For 
his was a strenuous life, founded on new ideals and 
ambitions as yet incapable of being appreciated by 
the majority of his contemporaries. 

Every provincial citizen was not a Ralph Allen, 
a Mathew Boulton, or a Thomas Wright, each of 
whom represented in a high degree the aims of 
the new townsman — aims which hitherto had not 
existed. Still, a combination of energy, culture, and 
humanism now became a prominent and remark- 
able feature of the more influential and admirable 
inhabitants of the larger cities, gradually influencing 
the whole community and changing the national 
tone. The enthusiasm which, during the greater 



THE NEW PROVINCIAL CITIZEN 223 

part of the century, was so much derided, entered 
considerably into the temperament of the new citizen, 
though it was hidden by a characteristic reserve, and 
never carried him beyond the bounds of common 
sense. He illustrated once again the capacity of 
the English people to effect revolutions, the import- 
ance of which was scarcely perceptible to the men of 
the age in which the movement occurred. 



CHAPTER XIV 

The Woman of Letters 

As we further scan the scene, we perceive, towards 
the second half of the century, an unobtrusive figure, 
scarcely perceptible in the crowd, — the woman of 
letters, like the men whom we have just analysed, 
an inevitable offspring of the time spirit. She 
springs up — though anything but complete — a new 
personality, at once eager and apologetic, uncertain 
of her footing and indefinite in her aims. To become 
in those days a woman of letters implied the assertion 
of a form of feminine individual independence opposed 
to existing social traditions, one which was in a sense 
a revolt against prevailing ideas. The woman of 
letters in that age was therefore frequently afraid 
that she was acting in a manner which was censurable 
and, even when successful in her efforts, she was 
not altogether satisfied with her position. 

In the memoir of Mrs. Radcliffe, the novelist, 
written with the sanction of her husband, and which is 
prefixed to the romance of " Gaston de Blondeville," 
published after her death, are two statements which 
to-day seem ludicrous, but which are illustrative of 
the position in the eighteenth century of the woman 

224 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 225 

of letters. " There was also," the writer adds, 
" in the feeling of old gentility, which most of her 
relatives cherished, a natural repugnance to author- 
ship, which she never entirely lost even after her 
splendid success was ensured, and she had found 
herself the creator of a new class in English romances." ^ 
And the antagonism between gentility and the pro- 
fession of letters is emphasised, a few pages farther on, 
still more markedly : " Nothing could tempt her to 
sink for a moment the gentlewoman in the novelist." 

In this beginning of a phase of modern feminism, 
those who can accurately be termed women of letters 
are so few that they do not form a class, or a separate 
section of society, which can be described by generic 
characterization. Their rare figures, pioneers of a 
multitude of later writers, and unconscious leaders 
in the rebellion of the woman against the mastery 
of the man, are all the more remarkable. We 
will select a small group, and study the members 
of it individually, since they are representatives of 
distinct forms of literature. At once we summon 
before us Fanny Burney, Anna Seward, and Ann 
Radcliffe. The name of Elizabeth Carter may occur 
to some readers, but she was rather the scholarly 
student than the woman of letters, whilst Hannah 
More, after a versatile literary youth, became absorbed 
in philanthropy and social reforms. Every one 
however, reads at some time the novels of Fanny 

^ " The Posthumous Works of Ann Radcliife, to which is pre- 
fixed a Memoir of the Authoress," vol. i. p. 7. 

15 



l±i ANNA SEWARD 

Burney, for she is an English classic, but one 
may well suppose that the poetry of Miss Seward 
is only taken down from a dusty shelf by a curious 
student. As to Mrs. Radcliffe, her thrilling romances 
are wellnigh forgotten, though they are still quite as 
readable as many stories that now obtain popular 
perusal. 

In her day Miss Seward the poet was as much a 
celebrity as Miss Burney the novelist. The writing of 
verse was as fashionable as needlework, and so common 
that Horace Walpole professed to be bored by it. 
But the difference which we first note between 
Fanny Burney and Anna Seward is that one was 
a star of the capital, the other of the quiet cathedral 
town of Lichfield. " If there is a part of England 
peculiarly sacred to literature and the muses it is 
Lichfield. It is the land of poetry itself, and as 
long as the names of Garrick, of Johnson, and of 
Seward shall endure, Lichfield will live renowned."^ 
So wrote a traveller in 1791. It does not matter 
that to-day the verses of Miss Seward will scarcely 
bear perusal ; much that is now printed will eventu- 
ally share its fate ; the point of interest is that Miss 
Seward was a prominent woman of letters in the 
eighteenth century, and that nearly everything she 
wrote pleased the taste of the time, and was popular, 
whether it was in the nature of a patriotic piece 

1 " A Tour through the South of England, Wales, and part of 
Ireland, made in the Summer of 1791," quoted in Lucas, "A Swan 
and her Friends," p. 79. 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 227 

such as the "Monody on Major Andre," (1781 
or a sentimental " poetical novel " like " Louisa." 

Not one of these women was a literary trifler, a 
journalistic hack, or a mere book-maker. We must 
distinguish, too, the woman of letters from those who 
posed as such — the blue stocking and the literary 
entertainer. Mrs. Montagu, like Mrs. Piozzi, and like 
Lady Miller of Bath Easton fame, was only a clever 
woman with literary leanings and a long purse, who 
liked to surround herself with, and to patronise and 
entertain, men of letters. The mistresses of the 
Parisian salons — Madame du Deffand and Madame 
Geoffrin, for example — were not women of letters ; 
they were clever and cultivated ladies, who presided 
over " intellectual exchanges," ^ and that was in fact 
the function — though with marked differences- — of 
these, and some other English hostesses. Both Fanny 
Burney and Anna Seward regarded literature as an 
art. Indeed, it is one of the little ironies of literary 
history that Miss Seward, who gave so much pains to 
her work, and in whom lived, as she rather pathetic- 
ally wrote — 

" The hope, that yet my verse-encircled themes. 
Buoyant may rise above oblivion's streams," 

has departed into the literary unknown. That, again, 
is not immaterial to our present purpose, which is 
to depict the character of the literary woman of 
the eighteenth century, and, in connexion with her 

1 Helen Clergue, " The Salon," p. 20. 



228 ANNA SEWARD 

to note the genesis of an influential form of modern 
feminism. 

Anna Seward was a woman with both mental and 
physical attractions. Her father, . the Reverend 
Thomas Seward, became a Canon Residentiary of 
Lichfield Cathedral and, in 1754, came to live in 
the Bishop's Palace, thenceforth the home of the 
Swan of Lichfield, as she was called, till her 
death in 1809. Her life was no more eventful, with 
its domestic joys and sorrows, its personal likes and 
dislikes, betrothals and marriages of friends, than 
that of the daughter of any other clergyman in any 
other cathedral city of England in the eighteenth 
century. But Miss Seward succeeded by her writings 
in obtaining contemporary fame as a woman of 
letters, and she was a close and lifelong student of 
literature. It is to her credit that she formed in- 
dependent judgments, which are, however, singularly 
wanting in insight into literary values. " Wordsworth 
has genius," she wrote, in 1798, " but his poetry is 
harsh, turgid and obscure." But even in her 
failures as a critic she is illustrative of her age 
and of its ideas, and of the new strivings of women 
of ability to take a substantial and an individual 
part in the intellectual life of the time. The senti- 
mentality which pervades all her writings reflects 
the sentimentality which characterised the women 
of the middle class of the eighteenth century. When 
Hayley, a second-rate poet, stayed at Lichfield, she 
composed an " Epistle to William Hayley." Having 




Z/, V 



Anna Seward. 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 229 

accompanied her guest on part of his journey, she 
concludes by a description of her return home : 

" And now the clamorous bell's unwelcome peal 
Calls me, reluctant, to the cheerless meal ; 
No bounding step along the hall I hear, 
But turn my head, and hide the starting tear." ^ 

One regrets that an affectionate nature should make 
itself ridiculous by such an absence of perception of 
the relations between expression and feeling as is 
shown in these lines. Of this feature of the time 
something has already been said,^ but the sickliness 
and affectation of nearly all Miss Seward's poems — 
Elegies, Monodies, and Epistles — make them in 
many respects now more valuable, because she shows 
herself a typical woman of letters of her age, hampered 
by conventionality, but seeking after individuality. 

It must be said in Miss Seward's favour that she 
possessed a sensitive appreciation of the beauties of 
the country, but unfortunately she could seldom 
write of them in a natural manner. In the ** Anni- 
versary," written in June, 1767, she begins with an 
apt description of Lichfield — 

" Ah, lovely Lichfield, that so long hast shone, 
In blended charms peculiarly thine own ; 
Stately, yet rural ; through thy choral day. 
Though shady, cheerful, and though quiet, gay," 

But she soon drifts among " groves," and " vernal 
suns," and " bowers." In fact, the moment she 



1 « 
2 



Poetical Worb," vol. ii. p. i^g. 
Ante, p. 169. 



230 MRS. RADCLIFFE 

began to describe she posed with her pen ; yet, even 
in this respect, she is a representative figure, as appre- 
ciative as a modern writer of natural features, but 
unable to escape from a literary mannerism which pre- 
vented the simple description of a sunset or a dawn. 

Had Anna Seward lived in the environment of 
Fanny Burney and not in a cathedral town, it may 
be she would have had a truer sense of literary pro- 
portion as well as of intellectual values; but in that 
case perhaps she would not have been an author, 
and so we of a later generation would have lost a 
typical figure on the scene before us. 

Mrs. Radcliffe was by temperament so quiet and 
retiring, her five romances, " The Castles of Athlin 
and Dunboyne," " A Sicilian Romance," " The 
Romance of the Forest," " The Mysteries of Udolpho," 
and " The Italian," published in her lifetime, were 
all issued within so short a period — from 1789 to 
1797 — that even to her contemporaries she was a 
little-known figure. She blazed in the literary horizon 
for a brief space, and then disappeared. Yet she 
had the attributes of a woman of letters, and the 
many descriptive notes of her English tours have 
some of the insight, the simplicity, and the charm 
of the delightful journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. 
A greater contrast there could not be than the quiet 
realism of these notes — " the sea in gloom with 
gleams of cold, silver light, where the clouds begin 
to break," and " distant lights appearing from the 
ships successively, as the evening deepened, like glow- 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 231 

worms, and dotting the waters far around " — with 
the unreality of her imaginative romances, filled with 
crime and mystery. Never indeed did a more normal 
and cheerful creature supply the public with horrors 
to the full. With ample means and leisure, gifted 
with an unusually vivid imagination and a consider- 
able capacity of expression, Mrs. Radcliffe might 
easily have been the authoress of a long series of 
romances. Publishers paid her well ; for " The 
Mysteries of Udolpho " she received ^500, for " The 
Italian," though shorter, the payment was ;^8oo. 
But an obvious dislike of publicity, springing to some 
extent from the novelty of the position of the woman 
of letters in her day, caused Mrs. Radcliffe to prefer a 
lettered ease to literary fame, so that years before her 
death she was supposed by the world at large to 
be no longer alive. But she remains a distinctive 
figure on the scene. The Old English Baron (1777), 
of Clara Reeve, had already interested many readers, 
and Walpole's '* Castle of Otranto" (1764) had had 
considerable vogue, but Mrs. Radcliffe was the first 
writer to popularize the modern romantic novel. 

Fanny Burney is a more attractive personality than 
sentimental Anna Seward or than the indistinct figure 
of Ann Radcliffe. She is typical of the woman of 
letters of the capital, as Miss Seward is of the fre- 
cieuse of the country town. In comparing these two 
figures, we are struck by the absence of pose in the 
one, and the very serious manner in which the other 
took herself. In these points each exhibits the par- 



232 FANNY BURNEY 

ticular and constant characteristics of the Londoner 
and the provincial. Again, Fanny Burney was the 
centre of a famous circle ; Johnson and Goldsmith, 
the Thrales, and the French emigres in the last 
decade of the century, overwhelm shrewd Dr. Erasmus 
Darwin and the less distinguished visitors to Lich- 
field, who are to be noted around Anna Seward. 
Personally unimpressive, and of no great intellectual 
power, Fanny Burney hardly ever said a word or 
wrote a sentence which contained a thought worth 
remembering. But this absence of conspicuous gifts 
was more than counterbalanced by a singular union 
of delicate qualities, for she united an inborn and 
modest sagacity to a vivacity of manner, a gaiety 
of heart, and a sense of humour. 

The high spirits of Miss Burney were kept in check 
by a sensitiveness which often resulted in shyness, 
and by a sweet and loving temper, which, combined 
with susceptibility and instinctive intelligence, gave 
her so much charm that every one who knew her liked 
her. Hers was a character the attraction of which 
it is difficult for us to realize, just as no description 
can convey mobility of feature or the glance and 
light of the eye. Men like Johnson and Burke, and 
women like Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Thrale, would never 
have had so warm an affection for Fanny Burney had 
she not possessed a personal charm which we, never 
having seen her, cannot possibly appreciate. If, 
however, this tradition of individual charm were all 
that remained, Fanny Burney would now be little 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 233 

more than a name ; but she had the good fortune to 
have been born with unique intellectual character- 
istics. She was gifted with an unusually quick 
perception of the more superficial aspects of char- 
acter, and she was endowed with an abnormal desire 
and capacity to record her mental impressions. Only 
sixteen when she began what is known as her " Early- 
Diary," one of the first passages which she wrote 
in the summer-house at King's Lynn is this : 

" I always spend the evening, sometimes all the 
afternoon, in this sweet cabin — except sometimes, 
when unusually thoughtful, I prefer the garden. . . . 
I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down 
my thoughts, at the very moment, my opinion of 
people when I first see them, and how I alter or how 
I confirm myself in it ; and I am much deceived in 
my foresight if I shall not have very great delight 
in reading this living proof of my manner of passing 
my time, my sentiments, my thoughts of people I 
know, and a thousand other things in future. 



55 1 



This inborn love of the observation of character was 
in process of constant cultivation from the time she 
could write a word, and the desire to record what 
she calls her " opinion " — a result not of analytical 
judgment but of abnormal perception, " an instinct 
throned in reason's place " — was so keen that she 
found material in the slightest circumstances of daily 
^ " Earl^ Diar^," vol. i. p. i^. 



234 FANNY BURNEY'S CHARACTER 

domestic and social existence which possessed the 
least human interest. A diary, and letters written 
from childhood to old age, present lively pictures 
of friends and acquaintances, of her social environ- 
ment, and of the personal characteristics of those 
whom she met from day to day and from week to 
week. 

Her five novels are of value and interest for our 
present purpose because they are supplementary to 
her own records, and contain, in the form of stories, 
a collection of illustrative characters. Fanny Burney 
is the heroine of each. She is both Evelina and 
Cecilia, and Evelina and Cecilia are Fanny Burney, 
in a series of imaginary situations, saying and writing 
what Fanny Burney would say and write under the 
like circumstances. " She found in the abilities of 
Mrs. Delvile sources inexhaustible of entertainment." 
For Mrs. Delvile read Mrs. Thrale or Mrs. Montagu, 
and fiction at once becomes fact. Most of the 
characters whom her heroines meet in the course of 
so much of their lives as she presents to us are people 
with those outward characteristics, more or less 
emphasized, whom Fanny Burney has seen, or spoken 
to, or been told of. Mr. Briggs, the miser in " Cecilia," 
is as much a true character — it has been said that he 
was drawn from Nollekens the sculptor — as " Mr. 
Turbulent " in the " Diary," otherwise the Reverend 
Charles de Guiffardiere, the Queen's French reader, 
who seems to have tried to carry on a ridiculous 
flirtation by a mixture of rodomontade and sentiment^ 




Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arelay). 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 235 

In fact, the mere sight of a man or woman in society 
without actual personal acquaintance was sufficient 
foundation on which Fanny Burney's lively imagina- 
tion could construct a character, by means of her 
acute perception, more or less true to life. 

Fanny Burney was born one of the middle class at 
the very time when a part of that increasing section of 
English society, both in London and in the large 
provincial towns, was endeavouring to become culti- 
vated, and was breaking out of the narrow social and 
intellectual bounds within which it had hitherto 
been content to live. The character of her father, 
his versatility and love of music, his energy and his 
sociability, stimulated her natural intelligence, while 
the whole Burney family was marked alike by " sweet- 
ness and light." Fanny Burney was thus a typical 
middle-class girl of the new order, ever seeking in 
her Diary and novels to emphasize the attractions of 
wit, intelligence, and refinement. " The delicacy of 
her mind," she writes, when describing the position 
of Cecilia on the death of her old friend, Mrs. Charlton, 
" and the refinement of her ideas had now rendered 
her fastidious, and she would have looked out for 
elegancies and talents to which Mrs. Charlton had 
no pretensions, but those who live in the country 
have little power of selection ; confined to a small 
circle, they must be content with what it offers." ^ 

Fanny Burney did not practise what she preached ; 
her desire was to find friends who had delicacy 
= ^ " Cecilia," bk. iii. chap. 9. 



236 FANNY BURNEY'S OPINIONS 

of mind and refinement of ideas. She possessed 
each herself, and each was in a more or less degree 
characteristic of the new woman of the day; but 
these qualities, among some, were exaggerated into 
prudery and affectation, and a contempt for plain 
common sense which was sometimes entirely wanting 
in those who prided themselves both on their wit 
and learning. Fanny Burney never disguises her 
dislike for disagreeable people. She depicts stupidity 
and boorishness with contemptuous pleasure, the 
well-to-do Braughton family, from the shop in Snow 
Hill, with their vulgarity and intellectual pro- 
vincialism, their limited stock of ideas, their class 
prejudices, and their want of taste, are to her 
vividly representative of an unattractive section of 
city mercantile society. And, when she makes old 
Briggs exclaim to Cecilia, " Books ! What do you 
want with books ? do no good ; all lost time ; 
words get no cash," she is holding up to ridicule a 
whole class of men who are yet by no means extinct. 
The satisfaction with which she narrates examples 
of unspontaneous humour and superficial cleverness is 
equally evident throughout her books. 

A weakness of the middle class of the eighteenth 
century is obvious alike in her appreciation of mere 
accomplishments, and in her absurd delineations of the 
aristocracy and those who were allied to it. She per- 
ceives that peers and peeresses belong to a rank above 
hers ; she is in awe of them, but yet she has for them 
the jealousy of the professional and trading classes. 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 237 

From her ignorance of them she makes the amiable 
Lord Orville a perfectly colourless peer, while Sir 
Clement Willoughby and Sir Robert Floyer are 
conventional aristocratic rakes. 

For this bad opinion of some of the nobility 
they had only themselves to thank. The Duke 
of Queensberry never concealed his vices, and Dr. 
Burney when he lived at Lynn was one of those 
who assembled around the third Lord Orford's table 
at Haughton, at the head of which always sat a 
person named Patty : every one " addressed her by 
the same free appellation." 

. Fanny Burney was so observant and so quick that 
she caught in an instant everything which Dr. Burney 
said, and while Lord Orford would thus suitably sit 
to her as a rake, Fulk Greville, who was always trying 
to be uncommon, and who called everything that 
was convention, " fogrum," was the typical man of 
the ton, Mr. Delvile, who is presented as an 
aristocrat, says to his son, of an Eton and Oxford 
friend : " We know he is not a man of rank, and 
whatever he may be he cannot become a man of 
family, and, consequently, for Mortimer Delvile he 
is no companion," is depicted with such exaggeration 
in his pride and pomposity that he becomes a bur- 
lesque of reality. But the very exaggeration arises 
because the writer is aware that the aristocracy is a 
class distinct from and higher than her own, and she 
supposes that they speak and act differently from other 
people, and have manners and feelings as grandiose 



238 FANNY BURNEY AT COURT 

as their equipages. Yet at tlie same time she is 
jealous of them, so that while she envies, she holds 
them up to contempt. She writes of the aristocracy 
as men and women of the middle classes talked of 
them, and we can see clearly the social relations 
then existing between two great sections of the 
English people, their approaching proximity, the 
gradual breaking down of long-existing social barriers. 
On the one side were respect and contempt, 
timidity and envy, doubt and ambition ; on the 
other, condescension and politeness, arbitrariness and 
some perception of the rise of a new power. 

It is surprising that this middle-class young 
woman with her intellectual ambition and suburban 
prejudices should become a Court lady, and fill a place 
which was one of those usually occupied by the 
daughter of an impecunious peer. No wonder that 
she was never tired of writing of the kindness and 
condescension of George III. and his Queen. These, 
whom the middle class still regarded with awe as 
celestial potentates, were always speaking and acting 
like men and women from Leicester Fields and St. 
Martin's Street, but their resemblance to common 
mortals always seemed to Fanny Burney the result 
of superhuman qualities. When one notes how, 
month after month, she could continue to write 
of George III. as if he were of different mind and 
matter from other men, one can feel how difficult 
was the task of Charles Fox and the Reform Party; 
for the King was largely supported in his political 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 239 

action not by a popular belief in his sagacity, but 
by a blind and unreasoned idea in the necessary virtue 
and wisdom of the occupant of the throne. Single 
passages scarcely convey this feeling adequately to a 
reader, but it is perceptible in Fanny Burney's rela- 
tion of her visit to the royal residence, after she had 
given up her place at Court, on the King's birthday, 
in 1792. She begins by a kind of mild invocation: 
" June 4. The birthday of our truly good King." 
Then she continues : 

" As His Majesty had himself given me, when I 
saw him after the Queen's birthday, an implied re- 
proach for not presenting myself at the palace that 
day, I determined not to incur a similar censure on 
this, especially as I hold my admission on such a 
national festival, a real happiness, as well as honour, 
when it is to see themselves." 

The diarist next describes her dress and the manner 
of approaching the palace, and how she is received 
by Princess Elizabeth and then is ushered into the 
state drawing-room, where she finds the Queen : 
" her head attired for the drawing-room superbly, 
but the Court dress, as usual, remaining to be put on 
at St. James." The Queen was as pleasant and 
friendly as ever ; and " smiled upon me most gra- 
ciously," says the gratified visitor, and then the 
King entered. " I motioned to retreat, but calling 
out * What, Miss Burney ! ' the King came up to 



240 FANNY BURNEY AT COURT 

me, and inquired how I did : and began talking to 
me so pleasantly, so gaily, so kindly even, that I had 
the satisfaction of remaining, and of gathering courage 
to offer my good wishes and warm, fervent prayers for 
this day. He deigned to hear me very benignly, or 
made believe he did, for I did not make my harangue 
very audibly, but he must be sure of its purport." 
The King, like a good-natured elderly gentleman, 
told his trembling visitor that she had grown " quite 
fat," and measured her arm with his spread thumb 
and forefinger, and says Fanny, " the whole of his 
manner showed his perfect approbation of the step 
I had taken, of presenting myself in the Royal presence 
on this auspicious day." ^ 

The suggestion of a retreat when the Sovereign 
enters, the gathered courage, the warm, fervent 
prayers, the idea that he deigned to hear his subject 
benignly, the happy certainty of his perfect appro- 
bation, all indicate the feeling of an inferior being 
before one who could do no wrong, and they were 
described, not by a timid country girl, but by an 
intelligent lady who had served for several years in 
the royal household, who had been behind the scenes 
in the palace, and who, at home, was the friend of 
Burke and Windham, and was accustomed not only 
to hear frank political conversation, but to take part 
in it. In fact, in the very month in which she paid 
her respects to the King on his birthday, she tells 
us how " Mrs. Crewe, my father, and myself spent 
1 " Diary " (ed. A. Dobson), vol. v. p. 86. 



THE WOMAN OF LETTERS 241 

the evening together a little in talking politics," 
and Mrs. Crewe, be it remembered, was a friend of 
Fox, a favourite toast of the Whig party, " Mrs. 
Crewe and Buff and Blue " always evoking enthusiasm. 
If Fanny Burney had this feeling we need not wonder 
that Lord North was so long Prime Minister. 

Living in a cultured coterie, regarding mental, and 
especially literary, attainments as exceedingly admir- 
able, Fanny Burney was as little of a blue-stocking 
as of a Grub Street hack, and she was as different 
from Mrs. Montagu with her ostentatious functions, 
her learning and wit, her parties and her grand air, 
as from Lady Sarah Banbury, full of her horses and 
her hunting and the last love-affair in high life, 
or from captivating and accomplished Lady Diana 
Beauclerk. She represents another and a newer 
phase of society than that in which these and other 
vivacious ladies figured, and which many people 
have fallen into the habit of regarding as altogether 
typical of the age. One of this section of society, 
Lady Diana herself, occasionally flits across the 
scene, as when Burke tells of unhappiness in her 
life, pointing out her house to our diarist. But 
those who belonged to the fashionable circle, though 
they were living at the same time and in the same 
town, were not personally acquainted with that group 
of the middle-class which was fond of letters, enjoyed 
wit without coarseness, and smiled at the affecta- 
tion of the frecieuse as much as at the countrywoman's 
want of manners. Nevertheless, Fanny Burney re- 
16 



^2 FANNY BURNE Y AS WOMAN OF LETTERS 

fleets the influence of Mrs. Montagu, whose learning, 
wit, and wealth, united to an almost apostolic 
desire to spread the worship of culture, made her a 
power greater than in these days it is easy to 
realize. " I should," Fanny Burney said, when Mrs. 
Thrale asked her if she wished to see this cele- 
brated lady, " be the most insensible of all animals 
not to like to see our sex's glory." 

But while Fanny Burney could appreciate the value 
of Mrs. Montagu's intentions and her undoubted 
ability, she was too shrewd not to perceive her short- 
comings, for she continues : " A woman of such 
celebrity in the literary world would be the last 
I should covet to converse with, though one of 
the first I should wish to listen to." This was 
perfectly true, and consequently in her first inter- 
view, when " Evelina " was mentioned, she " began 
a vehement nose-blowing for the benefit of hand- 
kerchiefing my face," and when she was finally dis- 
closed as the authoress of " Evelina " to the lady 
whom Mr. Crisp called, not good-naturedly, " a 
professed female wit, authoress, and Maecenas into 
the bargain," she ran out of the room with the ut- 
most trepidation. Patronized kindly, regarded partly 
with amusement and partly with admiration, at 
once a heroine and a curiosity, a charming and an 
attractive creature, Fanny Burney will ever remain 
the most representative woman of letters of the 
eighteenth century. 




Mrs. Montagu. 



CHAPTER XV 

The Naval Officer 

" Hark you, Mrs. Frog, you'd best hold your tongue 
for I must make bold to tell you, if you don't, that 
I shall make no ceremony of tipping you out of the 
window." This is one of the remarks, addressed 
to a French lady, which Fanny Burney puts into the 
mouth of Captain Mirvan, the naval officer, who, 
after seven years of active service at sea, had returned 
to England to enjoy a holiday with his family. The 
words are characteristic of his daily manner and of 
his habitual expressions, which surround him with 
an atmosphere of the pothouse and the pantomime. 
The fine capacity of realistic portraiture, which 
never forsook Fanny Burney, did not fail her when 
she was sketching this naval officer of the eighteenth 
century. Captain Mirvan was drawn from life, and 
the novelist was never more true in depiction of 
character than when she described the husband of 
the gentle Mrs. Mirvan. But though the sketch is 
accurate so far as it goes, the portrait is not only 
incomplete but one-sided, for it is one only of the 

243 



244 UNIQUE PRODUCT OF THE AGE 

seaman on shore, where his simplicity, in contrast 
with the artificial manners of the landsman, causes 
him oftentimes to appear eccentric, even brutal, 
while his constant contact with realities at sea, the 
almost daily perils of his life, produced in him con- 
tempt for mere conventionalities. 
/ The naval officer of the eighteenth century was 
a unique product of his age, exhibiting some of its 
qualities in a striking, even in an exaggerated form. 
A strange combination of contrasts, he was a hero 
and a bully ; he united the bravery and the self- 
reliance of a seaman with the simplicity and the 
follies of a schoolboy. He was able to quote Latin 
with a university don, and at the same time surpass 
a bargee in foul language. One evening he might 
spend with the most degraded women in Portsmouth, 
the next be on his knees to a simpering miss. He 
might play a brutal practical joke on a midshipman 
who had just joined the ship, and on the morrow, 
without a moment's hesitation, risk his life for him. 
He drank himself to a state of imbecility, purloined 
stores, lent his money to a comrade in distress, or 
boarded a French frigate in the face of over- 
whelming numbers, with an equally cool and un- 
hesitating disregard of consequences. His virtues 
were inherent qualities, partly personal and partly 
hereditary, his vices were largely the results of the 
naval system under which he lived, one which 
aggravated the grosser characteristics of his time 
and the lower tendencies of human nature. / 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 245 

The Navy was still in process of transition from a 
haphazard collection of armed merchant-vessels to the 
highly organized fleets and scientifically constructed 
ships of modern times. Discipline, in the eigh- 
teenth century, was unequal ; in one ship it was 
preposterously lax ; in another it was brutally severe ; ^ 
one Captain was the butt, the other the terror, of 
his men. Smollett's Captain Oakum, who made life 
a misery to Roderick Random and his messmates on 
the thunder ^ is no imaginary picture; his prototype 
was to be found in many ships of war in this particular 
epoch, when the naval officer, brave as he was before 
the enemy, not seldom found his career ended by 
a sentence of a court-martial dismissing him for 
cruelty and oppression. " Our first lieutenant, old 
Constable, was a devil of a tyrant. When I first 
asked him leave to go on shore for a few hours, he 
said he would see me in hell first ; and on my thank- 
ing him for his kindness he swore if I did so again 
he would try me by a court-martial for my politeness. 
I was once * starting ' (with a rope's end or cane) 
the jolly-boat boys for being slack in getting into 
the boat, when old Constable being present and 
observing what I was about, * Damn my eyes, sir,' 
says he, ' that's not the way ; you should take a 
handspike and knock their brains out.' " ^ 

The first effect of the rudimentary discipline which 

1 Masefield, "Sea Life in Nelson's Time," p. 158. 

2 " Recollections of James Anthony Gardner, Commander, R.N. 
1775-1814)," p. 122. (Navy Records Society.) 



246 CRUELTY 

was to be found on board ship was to give the captain 
— who was an autocrat — and his officers arbitrary 
powers, which were often exercised without a sense 
of responsibility, and only to gratify personal dis- 
likes and a positive passion for cruelty. In 1787, 
when a small squadron of five vessels visited 
Quebec, the Governor ordered a review of the 
troops on the Plains of Abraham. The squadron 
considered that the most suitable compliment in 
return would be an execution. " In return for this 
brilliant and gratifying review, the Navy were about 
to amuse the natives by exhibiting an unfortunate 
veteran midshipman at the fore-yard arm of the 
Resource, This was prevented by Commodore Sawyer, 
who, more just and merciful than those who had 
condemned the man to death, reprieved him, but 
not until he had gone through the awful ceremony 
of placing the rope round his neck, which had such 
an effect as wellnigh to cause the poor man's death. 
BuUen, the midshipman alluded to, had been many 
years at sea, and was considered a quiet, inoffensive 
person, but in a riotous scene in the cockpit of the 
Resource he was accused of striking the first lieutenant, 
Mr. Ratsey. The charge was considered false, and 
not proved by those who attended the court-martial ; 
indeed, it was almost impossible to know who struck 
the lieutenant, as there was no light, or if he was 
struck at all otherwise than accidentally in the general 
scuffle. If Paul Minchin had gone through the dis- 
graceful scene to which the poor midshipman was 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 247 

obliged to submit, it would have been a just punish- 
ment for the disgraceful order of his ship." ^ 
/ Rougher natures had therefore the best time of 
it, and an officer who acted like a gentleman was 
often neither obeyed hy his men nor respected by his 
comrades, so that gentler temperaments were obliged 
to assume the characteristics of the bully. Shipboard 
manners could not be put off with a uniform, and 
when an officer went ashore he often carried with him 
his coarse language, his oaths and his sea terms, his 
roughness and his horse-play, as well as a contempt 
for refinement. On land he had no opportunities of 
showing the self-reliance and bravery which life at sea 
in the eighteenth century constantly afforded, whether 
in battle or in the art of seamanship. /" Being on 
shore at Gosport " — Commander Gardner is writing 
of his friend Culmer, the oldest midshipman in the 
Navy, and in those days a midshipman was not neces- 
sarily a boy — " on a Sunday, he tried to get into a 
tavern when the people were at church, and was 
thundering at the door to no purpose, when the 
late Captain N. H. Eastwood, of the Royal Navy, 
happening to be passing at the time in plain clothes, 
made some observations on his conduct, and said, 
* Mr. Culmer, you are a disgrace to the service.' " 
This reproach enraged the rather ancient midship- 

^ " Letters of Sir T. Byam Martin " (Navy Records Society), vol. i. 
p. 105. Bullen had only been found guilty of taking hold of him (the 
prosecutor) by the collar in a riotous and mutinous manner. — Minutes 
of Court-Martial, cited Martin (note), p. 105. 



248 SIMPLE HEROISM OF NAVAL OFFICER 

man and produced a scene by no means creditable to 
the excitable officer. Yet in his better moments 
he used to sing a song commerative of the Dogger 
Bank action (August 5, 1781), the last stanza of 
which was descriptive of the finer qualities of these 
outwardly brutal beings. 

" Then our ship being so disabled, and our rigging shot away, 
And twenty of our brave fellows killed in the bloody fray ; 
And sixty-four were wounded, a dreadful sight to see, 
But yet the rest were willing to engage the enemy." 

The system, the method of life, the long periods 
of distant sea service, and the perpetual dangers from 
the enemy or from perils of the sea, accentuated 
elemental human qualities in a degree impossible in 
any other circumstances or in any other occupation. 
Brutality was constantly contrasted with bravery, 
and coarseness of language with tenderness of action. 
Still, though the naval officer may shock modern sus- 
ceptibilities, he appeals to us by his simple and un- 
ostentatious heroism. When Captain Charles Pole, in 
the Success, captured a Spanish frigate off Cape Spartel, 
in March, 1782, Nelson touched on it in a few un- 
impassioned words : " Captain Pole," he writes, " told 
me he wrote you yesterday. I am exceedingly happy 
at his success : in his seamanship he showed himself 
as much superior to the Don, as in his gallantry : and 
no man in the world so modest in his account of it." ^ 
The calm and courageous figure of the Naval Officer 
is heroic on the ocean. When we analyse him more 

1 "Dispatches and Letters of Viscount Nelson," vol. i. p. 61 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 249 

closely we find that he carried some of the charac- 
teristic qualities of his century to excess, its common 
sense, its sturdy tenacity, its appreciation of the 
material object to be attained, and its absence of 
emotion. 

Nelson's historic signal, which, like many historic 
lines, has lost some of its significance in daily usage, 
really expresses the radical basis of the mind of 
the naval officer — his country expected him to do 
his duty and he did it in his own way and according 
to his lights. He was without high or romantic ideals ; 
he did not go into battle for patriotism, for religion, 
or for his lady love. He was engaged to fight, and 
when the time came he fought. He was engaged to 
navigate his ship to the best of his ability, and he 
encountered and overcame almost inconceivable and 
constantly recurring perils with an undaunted heart, 
and in the simplest spirit of duty. He was accus- 
tomed to rely on himself, and neither expected nor 
received sympathy from his comrades. When the 
captain of a ship lost an anchor near the Mewstone, 
and a request for another was sent to the Com- 
missioner at Plymouth, the reply was : " I shall do 
no such thing. What brought you there ? Go and 
tell your captain if he gets into a hole he must get 
out of it again." Difficulties in fact formed part 
of the naval officer's daily life; they were ob- 
stacles which he had to overcome as a matter of 
course ; sometimes they consisted in nothing worse 
than picking up a lost anchor without assistance, 



2SO EARLY AGE AT SEA 

sometimes in boarding a French frigate which, had 
double the number of his own crew. If he fought 
bravely with the enemy, and worked his vessel 
through a winter's gale, he thought that he had done 
his duty ; at other times he might drink too much and 
break all the commandments with an easy conscience. 

The naval officer had the qualities which go to 
make a popular hero, especially in the age of which I 
am now attempting to depict some aspects ; his virtues 
and his vices alike appealed to the people. Men 
in those days read of a battle at sea in the meagre 
paragraphs of a newsletter or of a periodical weeks 
after the conflict was concluded. The Battle of the 
Nile, for instance, was fought on the first and second 
of August, but the news of it did not arrive in 
London till October the second, and Nelson's 
official dispatch was only printed in the newspapers 
of October the third. The naval officer became, 
therefore, a hero of romance; the warlike and the 
maritime instincts of the people tended to his glory, 
and around him the imagination of those who stayed 
at home could gather such stories of bravery and 
daring as they pleased. 

It is not surprising that naval officers should 
have formed an abnormal class, for they were at 
sea from childhood, isolated for months and years 
from their countrymen. Nelson was twelve years of 
age when he first set foot on a ship. Lord St. Vincent 
began his career at thirteen by a long voyage to 
Jamaica, and neither was an exception to the general 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 251 

rule.-^ The child was taken from home and plunged 
into a narrow society of which grossness and brutality 
were marked characteristics, one which was astonish- 
ingly indifferent to human life and suffering, and in 
which dishonesty, in the shape of peculation of stores, 
was habitual and was not regarded as dishonourable. 
*' Johnny Bone was a devil of a fellow at cap-a-bar 
(misappropriation of Government stores), and would 
stick at nothing. It is related that the late Lord 
Duncan, when he commanded the Edgar, once said 
to him, ' Whatever you do, Mr. Bone, I hope and 
trust you will not take the anchors from the bows.' " 
This is amusing enough to read now, but it certainly 
reveals a singular callousness to elementary principles 
of honesty. 

One must not forget that the common sailor, far 
from being eager to fight for his country, was 
" pressed," as the phrase was, into the service, often 
at the very moment when he had returned home 
from a long and arduous overseas voyage. " Most 
cordially do I give you joy," wrote the Marquis of 
Buckingham, in 1793, to Lord Grenville — as indiffer- 
ently as though referring to a drove of cattle in his park 
at Stowe — " of the arrival of the Jamaica and Lisbon 
fleets. I shall be impatient to learn what number 
of men have been taken out of them, but I know 
that it is estimated that these 250 sail ought to give 
2,000 men, and God knows your fleet wants them ; 

^ After 1812 no boy, except the son of an officer, could be placed 
on a ship's books till^he was thirteen. 



252 METHODS OF PRESERVING DISCIPLINE 

it is, however, certain that there are many seamen in 
every port, if the press was as hot as it might be." ^ 

The seaman was carried off in irons, like a slave, 
to a man-of-war, and the officers had to maintain 
some kind of discipline over a crowd of discontented 
and turbulent men, ever ready to mutiny or to murder. 
The shortest way to stop mutiny was the sharp 
severity of Lord St. Vincent — the cat and the yard- 
arm. *' I gave them (the crew) no time for reflection. 
Good, wholesome victuals, constant employment, and 
very severe flogging for every offence was their allow- 
ance ; and an example I made of one mutinous 
fellow for an improper speech to the boatswain by 
giving him twelve dozen lashes, very effectively put 
a stop to consequences that might have been fatal, 
as one of my people whom I sent in a prize was tried, 
condemned, and executed, on board the Ville de 
Paris for mutiny of the most daring nature." ^ 

But this constant and harassing conflict — often 
for self-preservation — with the worst elements of 
mankind could not fail to brutalize an officer who 
was not an exception to the general run of human 
nature, and it stimulated a dormant love of cruelty 
to be found in not a few human beings. 

The " youngster " — as he was called — ^went to sea, 
as I have said, at an age when most boys were 
sent to school. A battleship consequently became a 
seminary of an odd assortment of learning. The 

^ " Hist. M.S. Comm. 14th Rep." App., pt. v., vol. ii. p. 422. 
2 " Journal of Admiral James," p. 343 (Navy Records Society). 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 253 

schoolmaster — who was nearly always the chaplain — 
was often a clever man, sometimes an excellent scholar, 
but usually he occupied his position on a man-of-war 
because it was the last refuge of a drunkard, or of a 
dissolute spendthrift. " One night, several of us supped 
in the main hatchway berth on the orlop deck, when old 
Andrew Macbride, the schoolmaster (a man of splendid 
abilities, but unfortunately given to drinking), on 
this occasion got so drunk that Ned Moore, my 
worthy messmate, handed him a couple of tumblers 
of the juice of red pickled cabbage, and told him 
it was brandy-and-water, which he drank without 
taking the least notice." ^ The following stanzas from 
a piece written by a rhyming midshipman on the 
same Macbride, are even more suggestive : 

" From the raptures of grog shall a sage be controlled, 
And a man like myself submit to be schooled ? 
If I'm drunk, the lieutenant and captain may chide ; 
But I'll drink till I die, says sweet Andrew Macbride. 

" When I said the smell hurt me, the fools did believe ; 
Och hone ! my dear friends, I did you deceive ; 
When the taste or smell hurts me, may hell open wide. 
And I, damned there with water to drink, says Macbride." 

In fact, a boy often obtained a smattering of classical 
knowledge, of which he was always proud, from a man 
who was altogether unfitted to give him an adequate 
mental and moral training, and any virtues which 
the officer might show in later life — did he survive 

^ " Recollections of James Anthony Gardner," p. '](i (Navy 
Records Society). 



254 QUARTERS ON BOARD SHIP 

his first years at sea — were inborn, and seldom pro- 
duced either by the precepts, or by the example, 
of the teacher. If schoolmasters were not men of 
this kind, they were " respectable, half-educated men 
who were rising in life, and sometimes became 
pursers, sometimes even lieutenants," but who were 
unquestionably quite unfitted to be teachers. 

By his early experience of the sea, however, the 
naval officer gained professionally what he lost in 
education and manners — self-reliance became a part 
of his being : 

" Or if an unexpected call succeed, 
Come when it will, is equal to the need." 

He was a splendid seaman — dangers did not perturb 
him, hardships did not disturb him. From the 
moment he set foot on a ship he lived a life of extreme 
simplicity. Commander Gardner thus describes the 
place in which he lived, when, at the age of eleven, 
he found himself on the Panther, a frigate of sixty 
guns : " In this ship our mess-place had canvas screens 
scrubbed white, wainscot tables well polished, Windsor 
chairs, and a pantry fitted in the wing to stow our 
crockery and dinner traps with safety. The holy- 
stones and hand organs, in requisition twice a week, 
made our orlop deck as white as the boards of any 
crack drawing-room, the strictest attention being 
paid to cleanliness ; and everything had the appear- 
ance of Spartan simplicity. We used to sit down to 
a piece of salt beef, with sour krout, and dine gloriously 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 255 

with our pint of black strap (some wine) after, ready 
at all calls, and as fit for battle as for muster." 

To Fanny Burney's sensitive nature the grosser 
characteristics of the seaman were obvious and 
offensive, and even Johnson, who was not squeamish, 
was shocked by his sensuality and by the way in which 
generosity degenerated into childish extravagance. 
If he could have seen the sailor in a gale of wind on a 
lee shore, or living cheerfully day after day on half 
an allowance of bad water and worse provisions, or in 
a tropical climate with messmates dying around him 
from yellow fever, instead of on land in a tavern, he 
would have formed a different opinion of him. For 
a man should be viewed with a careful regard to 
perspective if we would regard him as a hero, and 
the moment we meet with the seaman ashore all 
romance fades away from him. 

The robust mind of Smollett could appreciate 
the seaman's fine qualities as well as his faults. Manly 
virtues, courage, and kindness, were conspicuous 
elements in the character of many naval officers, 
if cruelty was prominent in that of others. Tom 
Bowling's virile qualities outweigh his faults of manner, 
and one feels only admiration and goodwill for that 
boisterous and kindly sailor. Tom Bowling is in 
fact the sailor the popular hero ; Captain Oakum is 
the tyrant at sea ; Captain Mirvan is the naval ofificer 
much out of his element in a drawing-room. 

In the eighteenth century the State was indifferent 
to the tone of the Navy. Merit did not always fail 



2s6 PRIZE MONEY 

to obtain recognition, but favouritism and corruption 
were rife, and bribes could do not a little in the 
lower ranks of the service to obtain promotion and 
appointments. Promotion was slow and unequal, 
capable men often failed to rise, and at last retired on 
a pittance after years of deserving service. On the other 
hand, if an officer were lucky, he might obtain a large 
sum of prize-money, and many thousands of pounds 
might reward a daring and fortunate commander. 
It was characteristic of the age and of the men that 
the hope of prize-money permeated the service, and 
filled the minds alike of young and old, of able sea- 
men and of admirals : " If we have justice done us," 
wrote a light-hearted midshipman, in 1747, " we shall 
have a thousand pounds a man," ^ and a senior ofiicer 
thus couples promotion and prize-money : " Captain 
Bland informed me that both of us were to be made 
post-captains, and that he supposed the two prizes 
would give us each about three thousand pounds." ^ 

^ " Life of Lord Anson," p. 105. 

* " Journal of Admiral James," p. 380. The most remarkable 
instance of the value of a prize in the eighteenth century is that 
of the Spanish vessel Hermione which was captured in May, 1762, 
by H.M. ships Active and Favourite, off Cadiz. The net proceeds, 
^519,165, were divided as follows : 

£ s. d. 

Admiral and Commodore . . . 64,963 3 9 

Active 

Captain . . . . \ . . 65,053 13 9 
3 Commissioned Officers (total) , . 39,014 2 3 



THE NAVAL OFFICER 257 

The more we study England in the eighteenth 
century the more we are struck by this singular 
figure at once striking and uncommon, exhibiting the 
elemental qualities and the rude simplicity of his 
Northern ancestors. Circumstances make him con- 
spicuous, so that he is constantly before our eyes. 
Never before or since, has the navy played so 
dramatic, so active, or so long-sustained a part, as 
during the maritime wars of the eighteenth century, 
and public attention was fixed on the men who 
manned it. Time has to some extent assimilated 
the naval officer with the rest of his countrymen, 
though the sea will never leave its children without 
special characteristics, but during the reigns of the 
four Georges many circumstances tended to produce 
a class which was one of the most unique products 
of the age. 

The naval officer typifies the British hero of the 
eighteenth century — as Montcalm, and de Levis, 



8 Warrant Officers (total) 
20 Petty Officers (total) . 
158 men (total) 



Favourite 

Captain 
2 Commissioned Officers 
7 Warrant Officers 
16 Petty Officers . 
no men 

Ralfe, " Naval Chronology," vol. i., p. 240. 

17 



i s. 
34,689 5 
36,130 17 
76,132 13 


d. 

4 
8 



64,872 13 
25,949 I 
30,273 8 
28,832 6 


9 
6 

5 
3 


53,253 H 


4 



2s8 THE BRITISH HERO 

and others like them, do the romantic Frenchman, 
half soldier and half adventurer, of the same period 
— types which stand out hy contrast, and which 
often in those stirring times came into actual personal 
conflict. 



CHAPTER XVI 

The Country Clergy 

The contrast between the life of the naval officer 
with its dangers and hardships in the foggy cold 
of the North Sea and in the pestilential heats of the 
Tropics, and the placid existence of the country clergy- 
man in a tranquil and homely village in England, was 
not more vivid than that between the character of the 
two personalities. One, with all his faults, was inde- 
pendent and self-reliant, the other was obsequious 
and weak. As a minister of religion the country 
clergyman was without religious aspiration, enthu- 
siasm, or fervour, nor was the want of spiritual 
attributes compensated by the exercise of a mundane 
but useful administrative capacity. The feeling with 
which he was regarded by his contemporaries was one 
partly of pity and partly of contempt, yet this was 
the man who was found all over England, one of two 
main divisions, the beneficed clergy with their assist- 
ants the curates, and the unbeneficed parsons who 
were the domestic chaplains of peers and squires. 

In the first half of the century domestic chaplains 
were ubiquitous ; but as the century progressed their 
numbers diminished, though they were still a distinct 

259 



26o THE DOMESTIC CHAPLAIN 

and considerable body among the country clergy. 
They were largely responsible for the patent de- 
moralization of the clergy. Little better, in fact, than 
upper servants, they were inferior in some respects, 
indeed, to those who, at any rate, passed their days in 
honest toil. The domestic chaplain, on the contrary, 
was an idler, for at the best his clerical duties were of 
a perfunctory kind, and he was selected not from 
the point of view of religion, but to minister to the 
wants and the humours of his master, whether noble- 
man or untitled landowner ; he was factotum, agent, 
jester, and boon companion. We may select as an 
example from actual life one Mick Broughton, a 
facetious Irishman, a raconteur and a collector of 
gossip who, in the middle of the century, was 
chaplain, and made himself generally useful, to the 
Duke of Montrose and, later to the second Duke 
of Richmond.-^ In fiction Parson Supple, upon 
whom Squire Western could vent his bad humour, 
is a well-known type of many of his contemporaries. 
The treatment of the domestic chaplain by his 
employer of course varied, but generally he was 
more the slave of arbitrary whims and fancies than 
the domestic servant, and while he had to ape the 
gentleman he was treated as a menial. It was, for 
instance, a general practice for the chaplain — much 
against his will — to leave the dinner table at the 
end of the second course, unkindly deprived of 
the most dainty part of the meal. " To so ridicu- 
1 Earl of March, " A Duke and His Friends," p. 444. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY 261 

lous a height is the foolish custom grown, that 
even the Christmas pie, which in its very nature 
is a kind of unconsecrated cake and a badge of dis- 
tinction, is often forbidden to the Druid of the family."^ 
This is but one piece of evidence, among many others, 
of the degraded position of the domestic chaplain — 
a man who, in the words of an old rhyme, was hired 
for " diet, a horse, and thirty pounds a year." Like 
the Barthelemys and the Arnauds and other clever 
abbes, on the other side of the Channel, who played 
the part of intellectual tame cats in the salons and 
chateaux of the nobles, the English domestic chap- 
lain is a remarkable, but a more unpleasant, figure 
on the scene. 

The beneficed clergy, as also the unbeneficed 
chaplains, were usually men of humble birth who, 
if they had been educated at a university, had passed 
through it in an inferior position. At Oxford the 
servitors, and at Cambridge the sizars, who per- 
formed menial offices, as well as obtained learning, 
were those from whom the country clergy were 
chiefly recruited, but '' scholars " and pensioners, in 
fact, all poor students, as distinguished from men 
of independent fortune, were to a great extent taken 
from a lower social grade than they are at present.^ 
They were admittedly inferior to the fellow com- 
moners, who comprised the well-to-do undergraduates, 

1 The latter, No. 255, November 23, 1770. 

2 " Wordsworth, Social Life at the English Universities in the 
Eighteenth Century," p. 98. 



262 POOR LIVINGS 

and so at an early age the future clergyman was 
regarded, and regarded himself, as on a lower social 
plane than the gentry. From his boyhood he was 
taught to know his place, and whether chaplain or 
incumbent, he seldom forgot it. But he received 
the best education to be had in England, not in 
an ecclesiastical seminary, but among laymen of 
various social degrees. It was his misfortune that, 
in most cases, the knowledge which he had gained at 
Oxford or Cambridge soon grew dull amid the bucolic 
occupations of a poor country living, but at any rate 
it may be placed to his credit that he was never a 
religious bigot, and never sought after ecclesiastical 
domination. He was without the self-consciousness 
and pose which too often distinguish modern eccle- 
siastics, and his religious shortcomings even tended 
to the individual freedom of his parishioners. 

When the clergy were not derived from a humble 
social stratum they were generally the younger sons 
of squires, and were placed in family preferments 
solely from financial considerations. But the rich 
living was rare, and was seldom bestowed on a man 
without family or political interest, and we must, 
therefore, try to realize how numerous and how small 
were the stipends of the country clergy as a body. 
It helps to this realization when we note that the 
Crown livings in the gift of the Lord Chancellor were 
all under twenty pounds a year in value.-^ 

1 W. Pitt to Lord Grenville, "Hist. M.S. Comm. 14th Report," 
App., part v., vol. ii. p. 439. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY 263 

If we take two instances from contemporary 
fiction, we have the classical examples of worthy 
Dr. Primrose who, as Vicar of Wakefield, received 
an income of thirty-five pounds a year, while good- 
hearted Parson Adams had only a stipend of twenty- 
three pounds on which to keep his wife and six 
children. 

Not only was the remuneration insufiicient, it was 
often difficult to obtain, and tithes were painfully wrung 
from landowners and farmers. The poorer clergy 
were disheartened by their poverty, and were obliged 
to be obsequious to their more fortunate neighbours, 
and the richer were indifferent to everything but 
their own pleasures. Mrs. Thrale's genial friend. 
Dr. Whalley, accepted a lucrative living on the con- 
dition that he should never reside in the parish, 
because it was an unhealthy place, and so, while 
he enjoyed himself at Bath and scribbled verses for 
Lady Miller's Bath Easton vase, or played the dilet- 
tante at Florence, a poor curate did his work among 
the peasantry of the parish.-^ 

If a clergyman were in comfortable circumstances 
it was usually because he was a pluralist. One 
cannot take up a publication which contains 
domestic intelligence without seeing the death 
announced of some clergyman who held more than 
one benefice, as in the ^ozon and Country Maga- 
zine for April, 1782, where one notes the deaths of 

1 Broadly, "Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale." With an Essay 
Introductory by Thomas Seccombe, App. p. 308. 



264 COWPER ON THE CLERGY 

two rectors on the same day, each of whom held 
two benefices in different counties. By force of cir- 
cumstances, therefore, duty was neglected, and this 
condition of things caused in some cases the exist- 
ence of a number of very poorly paid assistants, 
so that this widespread pluralism from each point 
of view tended to the degradation of the country 
clergy. It was evident to the best friends of the 
Church. " What fruit is to be expected from the 
labours of a pastor who is willing to do all the good 
he can, is contented to drudge on with his little 
allowance, in hopes of seeing some good effect from 
his labours among his parishioners, but notwith- 
standing his best endeavours, falls into contempt of 
the meanest of them, which his poverty alone, without 
any personal demerit of his own to add to it, is 
sufficient to bring upon him ? " ^ 

No man was more sincerely religious or more 
tolerant in his views than Cowper, yet even he was 
obliged to admit that the clergy as a class were — ^with 
exceptions such as the Rev. John Newton, Vicar of 
Olney, who was at any rate earnest, if narrow-minded 
— open to much condemnation. So late in the cen- 
tury as 1790 he wrote to a clerical correspondent of a 
new bishop's work : " If he will keep the clergy to 
their business he shall have trouble, let him go where 
he may. And this is boldly spoken, considering I 
speak it to one of that reverend body. Some of 

^ John Elton, " Thesaurus Rerum Ecclesiasticarum," 1744* Preface, 
p.v. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY 265 

you could not be better and some of you are stark 
naught." ^ 

It must be admitted that the poor country parson 
was, after all, mpre to be pitied than to be blamed. 
Fixed in a remote country home, with an insufficient 
income and a too sufficient family, often in debt, 
sometimes sent to prison, he lived in a style little 
removed from, and often with daily agricultural work 
similar to, that of the uncouth farmers around him. 
Pigs and poultry foraged around the doorway of his 
house, and within, badly nourished children played 
about the rooms. John Wesley's father, who was 
both a scholar and a man of refinement — whose 
son has made the village of Epworth in Lincolnshire 
famous as his birthplace — was blessed by Providence 
with nineteen children, was always in straitened 
circumstances, and was once put in gaol for debt.^ 
He differed only from the neighbouring clergy in 
being both pious and learned. 

With hardly any hope of advancement, and devoid 
of religious enthusiasm, the country clergyman was 
a remarkable contrast to the masses of the middle 
class. The farmer, even the day-labourer, being 
forced to toil, received some stimulus from daily work. 
The incumbent, who could be as idle as he liked, 
would have felt more keenly the dreariness of his posi- 
tion, if he had not, like Fielding's Parson Trullibar,been 
often not only something of a farmer and a judge 

^ " Cowper's Letter to the Rev. W. Bagot," June 22, 1790. 
* Tyerman, " Life of Wesley," vol. i. p. 17. 



266 BISHOPS AND CLERGY 

of live stock, but one of the farming class. With little 
or no spiritual enthusiasm, however, nothing could 
prevent him from becoming a clerical drone. Active 
supervision by a superior, whether lay or ecclesiastical, 
is an incentive to exertion; but in the eighteenth 
century most bishops were not in the least inclined to 
take this view of their functions, and even those who 
were not unmindful of their authority exercised it 
so timidly that it had no weight. " Our liturgy," 
said Bishop Seeker who, in 1741, became Archbishop 
of Canterbury, in a charge to the clergy of the 
Diocese of Oxford, which was essentially a rural one, 
" consists of evening as well as of morning prayer, and 
no inconvenience can arise from attending it, pro- 
vided persons are within tolerable distance of church. 
Few have business at that time of day, and amusements 
ought never to be preferred on the Lord's day before 
religion, not to say that there is room for both." 
Very tolerant advice, no doubt, but not of the kind 
to keep the country clergy up to the mark. Thus, 
" mere appendages to the nobility and squirearchy," ^ 
without pressure from above and without spiritual 
stimulus from within, the country clergy were in a 
deplorable state, which was certain to result in some 
form of ecclesiastical revolution. 

John Wesley was a country curate, and the beginning 
of his career was, in fact, an individual revolt against 
the existing state of the country clergy as ministers 

^ Stephen, " English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth 
Century," p. 49. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY 267 

of religion. Pious, energetic, and with a keen per- 
ception of practical values and administration, these 
qualities were daily shocked by the complete 
absence of them in the ministers of religion in rural 
parts. Wesley, in fact, personified the revolt of 
the new middle class against the lethargy of the 
clergy of the Established Church, and as the founder 
of modern Nonconformity he laid the foundation 
of what is in one sense a lasting reminder of the 
country clergy of the eighteenth century. Visible 
everywhere throughout the rural districts, they are 
prominent figures on one part of the scene, and, in the 
aspect which they present to us, they are inseparably 
associated with this particular epoch. 

It must be remembered that since the Reformation 
the rural clergy had been in a parlous state, and 
that the social conditions which have been briefly 
described were not worse in the eighteenth than in 
the seventeenth century. But the vitality and 
energy which marked the new middle class, and 
the capacity and culture which characterized the 
aristocracy with all its faults, make the supineness in 
this age of the rural clergy the more noticeable. 
Some of the intellectual and moral conditions of the 
time developed in the clergy into vices. Want of en- 
thusiasm degenerated into disregard of duty, tolera- 
tion became indifference. The absence of any desire 
to secure proselytes, so contrary to the policy of 
the Roman Catholic Church, caused the clergy to 
drift into the opposite extreme, so that they cared 



268 SUPINENESS OF THE CLERGY 

not whether their parishioners were religious or 
irreligious. The fear of Romanism, which had in 
the days of Charles 11. and James II. been so im- 
portant and disturbing a factor among all classes of 
the nation, had not wholly died away, and " ornate 
and frequent services and symbolism of all kinds were 
regarded with suspicion, and consequently infrequent 
services, and especially infrequent communions, care- 
lessness about the Church fabrics, are conspicuous 
among the Church abuses of the period." ^ 

On the other hand, a vigorous sermon savoured 
of Puritanism, and was especially objectionable to 
the Tory squires, among whom the country parson 
passed his days, and on whose goodwill the comfort 
of his life not a little depended. In fact, the com- 
bination of several epochal influences with the exist- 
ence of a Church established by law, and bad social 
conditions, prevented the clergy of the Church of 
England from being affected by forces which were 
working so strongly among other classes. They 
remained tranquil and supine in a torpid backwater, 
unmoved by the stream which was vitalizing large 
sections of the people. Whether as a body they 
were dissatisfied with their lot, it is difficult now to 
determine. Once Jacobite, and always Tory, they 
were out of touch with the middle class, to which 
they generically belonged, and at the same time they 
were treated with contempt by the squires with 

^ Abbey and Overton, " The English Church in the Eighteenth 
Century," p. 282. 




The Sleeping Congregation. 



THE COUNTRY CLERGY 269 

whom they were politically connected. When they 
were esteemed by their neighbours, it was not 
for religious merit, but for simple human qualities — • 
not as ministers but as men. By the nobility they 
were regarded with absolute indifference. 

Like the peasantry who lived in cottages around 
the parsonage, the country clergy in the eighteenth 
century touched the lowest depth, social, pro- 
fessional, and intellectual, and it was not until 
their material condition was improved in the 
nineteenth century by such measures as the Union 
of Small Benefices Act 1809, and the Tithes Com- 
mutation Act 1836, that they began to attain more 
to the avenge middle-class standard of life. t 

Spiritual enthusiasm alone can lift men who are 
otherwise commonplace priests above the worldly 
crowd to which they humanly belong. In the suc- 
ceeding age various circumstances tended to produce 
some religious fervour, and as higher ideals of social 
duty, of which the new provincial citizen was the 
best exponent at the end of the eighteenth century, 
came into vogue, and a more ornate and emotional 
ritual began to prevail, the country clergy slowly 
emerged from the depths to which they had sunk at 
the time when this survey is taken of the English 
Scene. 

The peasants, their companions in misfortune, like 
them, the victims of overwhelming circumstances, 
alone remain to complete this picture of the age. 



CHAPTER XVII 

The Peasant 

The peasant fitly forms the last, as the nobleman did 
the first, figure on this portion of our Scene. We 
have passed from an infinitesimal body of men at the 
summit of political power and of social influence, who 
of all Englishmen most enjoyed their existence, to a 
mass of human beings who in every respect were 
exactly their opposite, and who may have oftentimes 
regretted that they ever had been born. For the 
peasant towards the close of the eighteenth century is 
a pathetic figure. As England increased in population 
and wealth, and as the middle class became more 
numerous and more prosperous, he became, as the 
century advanced, more dependent, less hopeful, 
less thrifty, and less sober. He was a victim of social 
and economical changes which benefited every other 
section of the community but which forced him to 
become a helpless hireling, one of a class henceforth 
sharply defined, and divided acutely from those above 
it, without the attachment of the farmer to the land, 
and without the gradually increasing common force 
and higher pay of the artisans in the new manufacturing 
towns — a man who was compelled to live on a small 

270 



THE PEASANT 271 

weekly wage in a precarious present and always in 
dread of the future. 

The link between the small farmer and the day- 
labourer, which had been a marked feature of agri- 
cultural life before the eighteenth century, was during 
this age gradually broken, with all that it implied in 
hope, independence, and personal pride, in its con- 
nexion between manual labour and possession of 
the soil, and in the opportunities which it afforded 
for social and material advancement. Small farms, 
says that keen observer Arthur Young, were " the 
first step which those labourers, servants, and 
others in general take when possessed of money 
enough to begin business." ^ In other words, the 
labourer had before him until the end of the seven- 
teenth century some hope and prospect of rising to 
a higher social and economic position. It was the 
pity of a change, which increased in force as the 
century drew on, one—the immense importance of 
which was not at the time foreseen — that it placed 
a permanent barrier before the upward progress of 
the tiller of the soil, and reduced him to a state of 
semi-servility. A free man, he had yet not a few 
of the characteristics, economic and political, of a 
— slave dependence on the will of a master, power- 
lessness, admitted inferiority to those above him, 
want of the attributes of a citizen. From this state 
of degradation it has since been the object of 
reformers of every kind and party to raise him. 
^ farmer's " Letters," 3rd edition, vol. i. p. 94. 



272 AGRICULTURAL TRANSITION 

This downward tendency — accentuated by the 
disappearance of domestic industries and the con- 
sequent divorce of a portion of the industrial popu- 
lation from the soil — continued throughout the 
century and into that which followed, so that in 
relation to the English peasantry the age is one 
essentially of transition, increasing certain deplorable 
features of rural life which had not for many years 
been altogether absent. Y 

The momentous results of this transition were 
visible from one end of England to the other, but 
in the North — in Westmorland, Cumberland, Lan- 
cashire — ^and also in Cheshire, as well as in Cornwall 
and Kent, the fall was less felt. Circumstances 
there enabled the workman of the fields to retain his 
independence longer, but both in the North and in 
the South during the eighteenth century he was 
fast becoming a man without a stake in the country, 
without self-respect, and without hope. " Formerly 
many of the lower sort of people occupied tenements 
of their own with parcels of land about them, or they 
rented such of others. On these they raised for 
themselves a considerable part of their subsistence, 
without being obliged, as now, to buy all they want 
at shops. And this kept numbers from coming to 
the parish. But since those small parcels of ground 
have been swallowed up in the contiguous farms 
and enclosures, and the cottages themselves have 
been pulled down, the families which used to occupy 
them are crowded together in decayed farmhouses, 



THE PEASANT 273 

with hardly ground enough about them for a cabbage 
garden ; and being thus reduced to mere hirelings, 
they are, of course, very liable to come to want. . . . 
Thus an amazing number of people have been re- 
duced from a comfortable state of partial independence 
to the precarious condition of hirelings, who, when 
out of work, must immediately come to the parish." ^ 

The importance of this passage lies in the fact that 
it is a statement by a country clergyman of things as 
he saw them, and as they existed around him in the 
pleasant county of Berkshire. In picturesque villages, 
in elm-lined lanes, on upland downs, and in river 
valleys, the peasantry were descending, as Davies 
pithily puts it, " from a comfortable state of partial 
independence to the precarious condition of hire- 
lings." This is the main, the cardinal fact to be 
grasped if, in a view of the English Scene in the 
eighteenth century, we would rightly understand 
the position of the class whose charming surroundings 
obscured its wretchedness. And this social descent 
was contemporaneous with the social ascent of numbers 
of the middle class, and with a remarkable growth" of 
national comfort and wealth. 

The rural labourer was insufficiently paid and badly 
fed. His average weekly wages over England may 
be taken at about eight shillings a week, and these 
earnings were insufficient to cover his expenditure. 
" All the budgets tell the same tale of im- 

^ " The Case of Labourers in Husbandry stated and considered 
by David Davies, Rector of Barkham, Berks." Bath, 1795. 

18 



274 PRICES OF FOOD 

poverished diet accompanied by an overwhelming 
strain, and an actual deficit. The normal labourer, 
even with constant employment, was no longer 
solvent." ^ It is true that the price of meat was 
low ; but this fact was useless to the peasant because 
his wages were not high enough to enable him to 
buy this kind of food. When Arthur Young made a 
tour through the South of England in 1764 he found 
that generally the price of bread was 2d, a pound. If 
we take the district around Oxford as an instance, 
it appears from Young's journal that wages were 
IS, a day, except in hay time, when they rose to 
IS, 6d,, and in harvest, when they reached 2s. The 
average therefore in Oxfordshire for the whole 
year could have been little over six shillings a week. 
Under these financial conditions the fact that mutton 
and beef were each only 4^. a pound ^ was of no assistance 
to the agricultural labourer ; to him they were 
luxuries which he could not purchase. But towards the 
last third of the century prices increased out of pro- 
portion to the increase of wages,^ and so the economic 
condition of the peasant became worse. In almost 
every family there was a deficit at the end of the 
year, and the peasant looked to parish relief as an 
ordinary addition to his earnings ; " house rents and 

^ J. L. and B. Hammond, " The Village Labourer, 1760-1870," 
p. III. 

2 " Six Weeks' Tour Through the Southern Counties " (3rd edition), 
1772, p. 323. 

* Hasbach, "A History of the English Agricultural Labourer," 
p. 116. 



THE PEASANT 275 

repairs were paid hy the parish, and relief in money 
or kind was distributed, the poor, when not too 
infirm, attending at the vestry to receive their 
portions. Medical relief was freely given, three or 
more different doctors receiving an annual settle- 
ment of their accounts." ^ The poor-rate, in fact, 
became a substitute for wages, for deserving and 
undeserving alike. 

A single set of figures will, for the purpose of the 
present view, sufficiently demonstrate the increase 
in the amount of poor relief between the middle 
and the end of the century, when, as we have seen, 
there was a striking change in the size and in the 
prosperity of the manufacturing towns. In 1750 the 
population of England was 6,467,000, the expenditure 
on poor relief was ^689,000, or 2 '2 per head. By 
1800 the population had risen to 9,140,000, but the 
cost of relief had become out of all proportion to the 
increase of population, for it was ^3,861,000, or 8*5 
per head.^ It is evident that during this half-century 
the peasant was being almost everywhere pauperized. 

The law of settlement was another factor detri- 
mental to the well-being of the labourer, on which a 
treatise might be written. Beginning with legisla- 
tion in 1662,^ the law became more and more strict, 
with a view to prevent persons who might become 
chargeable on the rates from gaining a settlement 

1 Davis, " Life in an English Village (Corsley, Wilts)," p. 73. 

2 Gamier, " Annals of the British Peasantry," p. 225. 
'13 and 14 Charles II., c. 12. 



276 CONDITION OF THE PEASANT 

in a new parish. So strict indeed did the law become, 
so closely was the admittance of a newcomer to a 
parish guarded by regulations and conditions often 
impossible of fulfilment, that a married peasant was 
virtually affixed to the parish where he was born. 
In early days, when the agricultural labourer was 
not a mere hireling, when he was one of a village 
community with interests in common fields, this 
immobility was scarcely an evil. But the moment 
this connexion with the land ceased, when agriculture 
was placed on a more businesslike footing, and when 
it became desirable that the peasant should be able 
to move from parish to parish to obtain work, the 
law of settlement made him almost, as immovable 
as the slave in Virginia or Kentucky. 

Thus, everything tended to make the peasant as 
thriftless as he was hopeless. He married young, he 
commonly begat a large family, which he had neither 
the means to educate, even when there was a school 
available, nor to clothe sufficiently, and he was con- 
tinually in debt to the village storekeeper, who per- 
sonified in the rural districts the commercial progress 
of the age. He and his family lived on insufficient fare 
— a little bread, rarely a scrap of meat, sometimes a 
bit of bacon, poor vegetables, weak tea, and unwhole- 
som'e beer. Milk and poultry he could no longer ob- 
tain, for pasturage and common were now alike taken 
from him. From the want of ground on which his 
spare time could be employed, he drifted to the ale- 
house for his amusement, and drink was his only means 




The ViLLAGK Ale-house. 



THE PEASANT 277 

of excitement. It is in this age that the evils of the 
modern public -house may be regarded as having their 
beginning. 

Most persons are more or less kind-hearted, and 
the poverty of the labourer now made him in every 
parish the object of charity, in an age when, through 
increasing wealth, other classes of the community 
were able to give of their possessions more liberally 
than heretofore. So that, at the very time when he 
was becoming more dependent on poor relief, the 
peasant was also becoming an habitual and 
subservient recipient of alms. The aggregate of 
charitable gifts, of beneficent donors, and of humble 
receivers became immense, and the agricultural 
labourer was everywhere regarded — as he regarded 
himself — as a man born to be assisted by poor 
relief or charity from the cradle to the grave. A 
feelfng of dependence became habitual on the one 
side, and of good-natured contempt on the other, 
for one who was always in want. These views were 
accentuated by the fact that the agricultural labourer 
had neither local nor political influence, and had 
no more voice in the management of his village or his 
country than if he had been really a slave. 

In the eighteenth century the modern relations 
— at any rate as they existed for the most part 
of the nineteenth century and which came to be 
regarded as a natural social feature — between the 
labourer and the farmer, the squire, the parson, and 
the well-to-do residents in the country became 



278 ROUNDSMAN SYSTEM 

stereotyped. Everything tended, in fact, to emphasize 
the peasant's dependent condition; as society in 
general became less archaic, he became more servile. 
Well-intentioned but mischievous legislation accen- 
tuated this state of servility. To keep the able- 
bodied out of the workhouse the Legislature, in 1782, 
passed an Act which from the name of its author, 
a well-known social reformer, was called Gilbert's 
Act.-^ It resulted in what became known as the 
Roundsman system. Though it illustrates the state 
of the agricultural labourer in the eighteenth century, 
the practice was more fatal in its effect at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth, and it was the hardship of it 
that it increased the degradation of the labourer. 

" The Roundsman system itself was split into three 
sub-species, the ordinary system, the special system, 
and the pauper auction. By the first and most 
usual, the parish in general makes some agreement 
with a farmer to sell him the labour of one or more 
paupers at a certain price, and pays to the pauper, 
out of the parish funds, the difference of that price 
and the allowance which the scale, according to 
the price of bread, and the number of his children, 
awards him.' By the second, ' the parish contracts 
with some individual, to have some work performed 
for him by paupers at a given price, the parish paying 
the paupers.' By the auction system the unemployed, 
including the aged and infirm, were put up to auction 
weekly or monthly, and knocked down to the highest 
1 22 Geo. III. c. 83. 



THE PEASANT 279 

bidder." ^ The pauper and the peasant were, in a 
large measure, one and the same, and thus even 
legislation tended to emphasize the dependent con- 
dition of the labourer ; and as English society generally 
advanced, he retrograded. 

In past times — to the beginning of the century — 
the tiller of the soil, other than the yeoman, had been 
either a servant or a labourer. In the first case he was 
lodged, fed, and paid by the employer ; in the second, 
" as a rule, he had a small holding of his own, and he 
also had incomings from the commons." In the one 
case he was a member of a family whose interests were 
his, sharing in his employer's good or ill fortune; 
in the other he belonged to an agricultural partner- 
ship, and had some of the independence which pro- 
duces strength of character and happiness of exist- 
ence. He fell into the pitiful state in which we 
view him in the eighteenth century, not through any 
faults of his own, but through the incidence of 
extraordinary and numerous causes,^ economic, social, 
and political, which in that century all tended 
to this same result — the degradation of the 
peasant. 

To depict a landscape is one thing, to analyse the 
causes of it is another ; and it is not with an in- 
vestigation of the factors which determined the posi- 
tion of the peasant toward the end of the century 

^ Hasbach, " History of the English Agricultural Labourer," p. i88. 
2 Cunningham, " Growth of English Industry and Commerce," 
pp. 713 et seq. 



28o FORCES AFFECTING THE PEASANT 

that I am now concerned ; it is with, his aspect as 
he stands on the scene before us, a depressing and 
a deplorable figure. 

If one passed from village to village exceptions 
to this general outlook were still to be observed. In 
some parts were yet to be found cottagers with rights 
of common of various kinds — of pasturage for cattle 
in common fields, or on unenclosed ground, or with 
lesser rights, such as those for geese and pigs to feed 
on waste land on what is now popularly known as 
a common. Squatters were also still to be noted, 
men who lived " near, in, or upon the commons and 
woods where they had built themselves huts, and 
perhaps cleared a little piece of land," ^ who enjoyed 
a free and independent kind of existence, work- 
ing sometimes for themselves, sometimes for a 
farmer. 

But each class was in process of extinction, and 
though the aspect of the peasantry varies in places, 
it is generally one of a patient and hopeless class 
spread over nearly all the rural districts of England, 
victims of wars and of their attendant taxation, 
of a more businesslike and scientific system of 
farming, of the increased cost of the necessaries of 
life — through the demands of the growing towns — ^ 
of the accelerated enclosure of commons * and com- 

1 Hasbach, " History of the Agricultural Labourer," p. 77. 

2 Conner, " Common Land and Inclosure," p. 381. 

3 ** In the reign of George IL 318,776 acres were enclosed ; in that 
of George IIL 5,686,400." — ^Hasbach, p. 58. 



THE PEASANT 281 

mon fields, of the consolidation of farms, and of the 
decrease of domestic industries. We see the peasant 
living among landlords and tenants who, in their 
several ways, were essentially capitalists, and whose 
pecuniary interests were opposed to his ; in a 
peaceful and picturesque environment, but with 
his freedom of life much curtailed by inevitable 
changes. At the same time he was more exposed 
to the severity of a cruel criminal law than any 
other Englishman. He passed his life in villages 
which have in many places changed but little 
since those times, in an Arcadia which was one 
in appearance only. A new and miserable state of 
society existed amidst the old surroundings, and 
" the century of steady social and industrial de- 
velopment " was a time of exceeding hardship for 
the agricultural labourer, for " the whole face of the 
country was changed by the Industrial Revolution " ^ 
which, while it increased the productiveness of the 
land, weighed heavily on the peasant, and on the small 
industrial workers of the country towns. 

Such is the aspect of the peasantry in the eighteenth 
century as it presents itself when we regard the 
scene. It will make us realize these aspects better 
if we conclude this outlook by a contemporary de- 
scription, for it is difficult for us to understand 
the overwhelming cataclysm which wholesale en- 
closure in a district brought upon the industrial and 

1 Cunningham, " Growth of English Industry and Commerce," 
p. 613. 



282 A PEASANT'S DESCRIPTION 

social life of a village. The Rev. Richard Warner was 
a clergyman of Bath, of cultivated tastes and accurate 
observation, who liked to ramble about England. 
On a tour through the West, in 1799, he came to 
Cheddar in Somersetshire, and there a labourer 
civilly gave him information as to the disappearance 
of some ancient tumuli. " This voluntary effusion 
of inborn good-nature," says the tourist, " introduced 
some conversation on my part, and led to an inquiry 
relative to the ancient and present state of Cheddar 
commons." Then follow the statements of the peasant, 
and, what is equally important and interesting, the 
reflections of the listener : " ^ Ah, sir,' said my new 
acquaintance, * time was, when these commons enabled 
the poor man to support his family, and bring up his 
children. Here he could turn out his cow and 
pony, feed his flock of geese, and keep his pig. But 
the inclosures have deprived him of these advantages. 
The labourer now has only his 14^. per day to depend 
upon, and that, sir (God knows), is little enough to 
keep himself, his wife, and, perhaps, five or six children, 
when bread is 3^. per lb., and wheat 13J. per bushel. 
The consequence is, the parish must now assist him. 
Poor-rates increase to a terrible height. The farmer 
grumbles, and grows hard-hearted. The labourer, 
knowing that others must maintain his family, if he 
do not do it himself, becomes careless, or idle, or a 
spendthrift, whilst the wife and children are obliged 
to struggle with want, or to apply to a surly overseer 
for a scanty allowance. This is the case with Cheddar, 



THE PEASANT 283 

now, sir, which (added he, with particular emphasis) 
is ruined for everlasting,'^ " 

The observations of the honest fellow seemed to 
be founded on such strong facts, that my prior 
opinion on this subject was, I confess, somewhat 
shaken. That much general good arises from the 
inclosing system is not to be doubted ; the sum of 
productive labour is increased, vast tracts of land 
are brought into cultivation, and additional crops of 
grain produced ; but these advantages are purchased 
by so large a proportion of individual evil, that it 
becomes a question of morals as well as policy, a 
question as difficult as it is important, whether that 
system ought to be generally adopted. Perhaps, 
were we to take the trouble of inquiring into the 
effects produced by it, where it has been followed, 
we should find them to be nearly similar to those 
above mentioned ; whilst the same observation would 
also evince that the price of grain had not abated 
in proportion to the additional quantities produced 
by it, nor the wages of the labourer been raised 
in proportion to the loss of those advantages of which 
he had been deprived by it. 

Perhaps, also (I only speak hyfothetically), we 
should discover that the chief advantage resulting 
from it had attached to the neighbouring landlord^ 
the value of whose estate was increased ; the farmer^ 
the profits of whose husbandry were enlarged ; and 
ihe rector, the quantum of whose composition was 
swollen by the system ; whilst the labouring peasantry , 



284 THE POWERLESS PEASANT 

the nerves and muscles of the country, deprived 
of those advantages which enabled them to participate 
in some of the humbler comforts of life, and kept alive 
that energy and industry which arise from a con- 
sciousness of indefendence^ of whatever degree it 
may be, sunk into listlessness, or quitted in despair 
their useful labours for the carelessness of a military 
life ; melting gradually away, and leaving us to 
experience and regret the truth of the poet's pro- 
phetical apostrophe : " ^ 

" 111 fares that land, to hast'ning ill a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay ; 
Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade ; 
A breath can make them, as a breath has made ; 
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride. 
When once destroy'd, can never be supply'd." 

The peasant — ^unexpectant — stood helpless, while 
the forces of what are called progress, for the 
time being, thrust him back. Discoveries which 
were increasing the wealth of new capitalists, and 
the application of economic theories which demon- 
strated the futility of the old rural and agricul- 
tural systems, were ruining him. At the same 
time, well-meaning social reformers and legislators 
were trying experiments upon him. He had nothing 
to say for himself, and against forces and experiments 
he was equally powerless. 

^ " A Walk through some of the Western Counties of England," 
by the Rev. Richard Warner of Bath, p. 51. 



INDEX 



Abbey & Overton, " The English 
Church in the Eighteenth 
Century," 268 
Addison, Joseph, 157 
Agriculture : 

causes of change in, 202, 203, 

206 
changes in, 271 
connection with manufactures, 

186 
industrial revolution, 205 
migration of men employed in, 
to towns, 203, 204; causes 
of, 204 
placed on a more business-like 
footing, 276 
Allen, Ralph, 89, 222 

a conspicuous figure at Bath, 

91 
connects Bath with literary 

society, 89 
employs Wood as architect, 79 
his early life, 90 
his house. Prior Park, 91 
Pope's character of, 93 
Pope's lines on, 94j^„^r' 
type of new provincial citizen, 
216 
Amusements, 171, 221 
Angling, 170 

Anson, Sir W., " Memoirs of the 

Third Duke of Grafton," 136 

Anstey, " The New Bath Guide " 

(12th edition, 1784), 145 
Arbuthnot, John, his sketch of 

John Bull, 20 -i^**^ 
Architecture, 165 

influence of nobility on, 146 
of Bath, 80, 81, 82 
Arkwright, Richard, 192, 193, 195 
his place in the industrial re- 
volution, 193, 194 
Armstrong, " Life of Gains- 
borough," 175 



Art, 71, 72, 71, 74, 140, 141, 144, 
175, 176 
among the nobility, 139, 140 
increase of appreciation of, 
among middle class, 175, 176 
Ashburnham, second Earl of, 141 
Austen, Jane, 174 
at Bath, 104 

central figure of last phase of 
literary society at Bath, 104 
unites zenith and decline of 
Bath, 104 

Bagnigge Wells, 7, 29 

Baines, " History of Liverpool," 

113, 117, 123 
Bar beau, " Life and Letters at 

Bath," 71, 82, 90 
Barre, Colonel Isaac, 129 
Bath, " The City of Pleasure," 222 

a city of pleasure, 59, 70 

as London in point of labour, 74 

aspect of, in eighteenth cen- 
tury, 82, 83, 89 

Barker of Bath, 71 

changes at, in time of Jane 
Austen, 105 

character of architecture, 81 

Cozens' scheme to teach art at, 
without study, 74 
(^'^escribed by Pope, 63 ; by 
Mrs. Delany, 64 ; by Mrs. 
Thrale, 64, 

effect of, on English society, 69 

Fanny Burney's description of, 
life at, 103 

frequenters of, 61 

Goldsmith's description of, 65 .i 

in art, 71 

in literature and drama, 70 «,^« 

in seventeenth century, 60, 61 

in the Middle Ages, 60 

Lady Huntingdon's chapel, 87 

meeting ground of men of all 



285 



286 



INDEX 



Bath [contd.) : 

sorts and conditions, 62, 65, 
66, 67 
Methodism unpopular in, 85 
modem character of, 61 
recreated architecturally, 82 
only city of informal social in- 
tercourse, 62, 69 
Smollett's description of so- 
ciety at, 6^ 
typical of the century, 165 
welcome of new arrivals at, 84 
Wesley and Whitefield at, 84, 

85, 86, 87, 89 
Wood, his work at, 80, 81 ; his 
influence on architecture of, 
81 
Beauclerk, Lady Diana, 24 1' 
Beckford, William, 176 
Bedford, fourth Duke of, 129, 203 
Bedford House, 7 
Bemrose, " Life and Works of 

Joseph Wright, A.R.A.," 176 
Besant, " London in the Eigh- 
teenth Century," 23, 47 
Birmingham, 2, 213 
book-clubs of, 153 
building of churches in, 178 

(note) 
debating societies of, 220 
population in 1770, 2 (note) 
Blomfield, " A Short History of 
Renaissance Architecture in 
England," 146 
Boswell, " Life of Johnson," 9 
Boulton, Mathew, 151, 152, 191, 

211, 216, 222 
Bridgwater, third Duke of, 196, 

197 
Bristol, 108 
Broadley, " Dr. Johnson and Mrs, 

Thrale," 263 
Burke, Edmund, 134, 164, 165, 

210, 232, 240, 241 
Burn, " History of Fleet Mar- 
riages," 46 
Burney, Dr. Charles, 159, 165, 

237 
Burney, Fanny (Madame D'Ar- 

blay), 21, 159, 162, 164, 173, 

225, 227, 231, 233, 235, 236, 

241, 242 
at Court, 238, 239, 240 
capacity of observation of 

character, 233 
characters in her novels, 234 



Burney, Fanny (Madame d'Ar- 
blay) (contd.) : 
description of a naval officer, 243 
life at Bath, 102, 103 
on country girls, 51 
power of observation, 233, 237 
see D'Arblay, Madam 
type of woman of letters of the 

capital, 231 
visits Bath, 99 

Canals, 197 

influence of industrial revolu- 
tion on, 197 
" Capital, The," see London "SC- 
Carlisle, fifth Earl of, 156 

as a picture collector, 130, 141, 
141 
Carter, Elizabeth, 225 
Chaplain, domestic, 259 

an idler, 260 

character of, 260 

life of, 260 

pay of, 261 
Chatham, first Earl of, 71 
Chesterfield, fourth Earl of, 139 

his villa at Blackheath, 32 

mot on Beau Nash, 78 

plans Grand Tour for son, 138 
Chetham, Humphrey, 215 
Clergue, Helen, the Salon, 227 
Churches, 43, 268 
Clergy, country : 

character of, 259 

contrast of, with other classes, 
267 

dull life of, 262 

education of, 261 

humble birth of, 261 

impecunious state of, 265 

often younger sons of squires, 
262 

out of touch with other classes, 
268 

pluraUsm among, 263, 264 

touched lowest depths in eigh- 
teenth century, 268 

types of, in fiction, 263, 265 

without enthusiasm, 265, 266, 
268 
Clive, Lord, 154 
' Clubs 

Brothers' club, 38 

N club at Slaughter's coffee-house, 
held in taverns, 38 



INDEX 



287 



/Clubs {contd.) : 

intermingling of different 

classes in, 40 
Ivy Lane Club, 39 
men of science members of, 19 
popularity of, 38 

V Sixpenny Card Club, 39 
The Club, 39 
Cock-fighting in London, 27 
jC^offee-houses, 34, 35 
I centres of news, 37 
\ frequenters of, 35 
I importance of, to all classes in 
/ London, 34 

/ meetings in, exemplify growth 
^■*-.«^f democratic spirit, 41 
Coke, Lady Mary, 53 
Cooke, " Life of Peel," 192 
Country life : 

increasing appreciation of, 31 
Cowper, William, 169 

on the clergy, 264 
Cozens, Alexander, 167 

at Bath, 74 
Cranston, 188 
Crewe, Mrs., 211, 240, 241 
Crisp, Samuel, 19, 160, 161, 162, 
242 

a type of cultivated man of 
middle class, 159 
Cundall, " History of British 

Water-Colour Painting," 74 
Cunningham, " Growth of English 

Industry and Commerce," 184, 

187, 202, 279, 281 



D'Arblay, Madam, "Early Diary," 

233 
" Cecilia," 235 
" Diary, ed." Dobson, 240 

Darby, Abraham, 188 

Dartmouth, first Earl of: 

collects pictures from abroad, 
141 note 

Darwin, Erasmus, 232 

Davies, " The Case of Labourers 
in Husbandry Stated and Con- 
sidered," 273 

Davis, " Life in an English Vil- 
lage," 275 

Defoe, Daniel, 147, 156, 184 
his " Review," 37 
writes for the middle class, 157 
" Tour Through Great Britain," 
vol. ii. (ed. 1725), 184 



Delany, Mrs. : 

" Autobiography," 64 
describes Bath, 64, 232 

" Dictionary of National Bio- 
graphy," Art. John Kay, 187 

Doddington, Bubb, first Lord 
Melcombe, 143 

Dorset, third Duke of, his collec- 
tion of pictures, 141 

Dudley Dud, 188 

Elton, " Thesaurus Rerum Ecclesi- 
asticarum," 264 

Enclosure, 205, 280 

Ernst, " Life of Lord Chester- 
field," 33 

Executions in London, 6 



Fairs, 200, 201 
Fielden, Joshua, 209 
Fielding, Henry, 164 

describes Ralph Allen as Squire 
All worthy, 95 

friendship with Ralph Allen, 

95 

Fielding, Sarah, 95 

Fleet marriages, 45, 46 
abolished in 1753, 45, 46 

Foote, Samuel, his play of the 
" Maid of Bath," 96, 97 

Foundling Hospital, 7 

Fox Bourne, " English News- 
papers," 37 

Fox, Charles James, 18, 52, 134 

Funerals, 47, 48, 49 

Gainsborough, Thomas, 166 
at Bath, 71, 72, y;^ 
price of pictures, by, 175 

Gambling, 18, 140 



Gamier, " Annals of the British 

Peasantry," 275 
Garrick David, 32, 226 
Gay, John, 91, 143 
Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xxii., 

14, 198 
Gilbert's Act, 278 
Goldsmith, Oliver, yy, 232 

" Life of Nash," 75 

on causes of popularity of Bath, 

65 
Gonner, " Common Land and 

Inclosure," 280 
Grafton, third Duke of, 135, 136 



288 



INDEX 



Grant, "The Newspaper Press," 

Z7 
Graves, The Trifieys, loi 
Gray, Thomas, 155, 

description of Falls of Lodore, 

167 
"Works," 168 
Green, " The Eighteenth-century 
Architecture of Bath," 79, 81 

Hammond, J, L. and B., "The 

Village Labourer," 274 
Hargreaves, James, 188 
Hasbach, " A History of the Eng- 
lish Agricultural Labourer," 
274, 279, 280 
Hastings, Warren, 154 
Hay ley, William, 228 
Highs, Thomas, 188, 193 
Highways : 

bequests for improvement of, 

198 
effect of improvement of, on 

local fairs, 200 
improvements in, after 1754, 

152. 197 
influence of men of industrial 
revolution on, 198, 199, 200 
state of, 197, 198 
statutes relating to, 199 
Hoare, William, 71 
Horse-racing, 170 
Hume, Joseph, 164 
Hunt, " Political History of Eng- 
land," 135 
Huntingdon, Lady, " Life and 

Times of," 84 
Hutton, W. H., " Burford Papers," 
159 

India, influence of, on middle 
class, 154 

Industrial revolution of eigh- 
teenth century 
a national movement, 178 
begins at accession of George I., 

183 
causes of, 183, 187 
character of, 196 
destroyed home industries, 186 
effect of, on fiscal condition of 
England, 206 

on agriculture, 205 

on population, 206 
extent of, 191 



Industrial revolution (contd.) : 

had no constitutional effect, 208 

importance of, not appreciated 

by contemporary observers, 

211 

no interference of the State in, 

210 
provides new industrial com- 
munities, 214 
sequel of constitutional con- 
flicts, 210 
two important classes of men 
of, 184, 189 

Johnson, Samuel, Dr., 31, 143, 
161, 164, 167, 211, 227 
as a founder of clubs, 38 
as a traveller, 31 
on the Thames, 9 
paper in the Idler, 55 

Kay, John, 187 

Langford, " A Century of Bir- 
mingham Life," 153, 178, 220 
Law, William, his " Serious Call," 

177 
Lawrence, Thomas, at Bath, 73 
Lecky, " History of England in 
the Eighteenth Century," 127 
Leeds, 185 
Leland, John, his description of 

Bath, 60 
Lennox, Lady Sarah (Bunbury), 

16, 174, 241 
Lichfield, 226, 228, 229 
Linley, Elizabeth (Mrs. R. B. Sheri- 
dan): 
her suitors at Bath, 96 
marriage to Sheridan, 97, 99 
Liverpool, "The Seaport," 213 
character of the town, 1 1 1 , 112 
communication between, and 

London, 109 (note) 
dances and card parties held at 

the Exchange, 113 
description of privateersmen j 
of, 118 / 

differs as a seaport from Lon-/ 

don and Bristol, 107, 108 
effect of slave trade on people 

of, 115, 116 
importance of slave trade to, 114 
importance to, of privateering, 
117, 119 



INDEX 



289 



Liverpool {confd.) : 

in touch with the sea, no, in 
its isolation, 109, no, 123 
merchants of, in, 112 
numbers employed in priva- 
teers, 120 
opposition of, to abolition of 

slave trade, 115 
payments to become a freeman 

of, 116 
political state of, 122 
population of, in 1781, 2 note 
reading-rooms attached to 

coffee-houses in, 153 
representative seaport of Eng- 
land, 108 
results of privateering, 119 
rum a favourite drink at 

dinner- tables, 113 ' — -■ 
seafaring population of, 120 
Sunday schools in, 217 note 
thoughts of people concentrated 

on the sea, 117, 121 
world-wide commerce of, 109 
..-tfssHLloyd's coffee-house, 35 *■ " 
Lombe, John, 188 
London, "The Capital," 221 
a capital, i, 3, 57 
a port, 108 

amusements in, 25, 26, 27, 28 
appreciation of country plea- 
sures by people of, 31 
aspect of, 56 
change of manners in, 32 
change of civic character, 213 
characteristics of, 17, 21 
^, character of its growth in 
^^i^E^-eighteenth century, 5 

character of people of, 15, 25 
character of tradesmen of, 21 
character of wives of trades- 
men, 50 
churches of, 43 
clergy of, 43 
clubs of. See Clubs 
combination of gambling and 

politics in, 18 
comparison of, with Paris, 58 
difference between size of, in 
eighteenth and twentieth cen- 
turies, 5 
dress of people of, 30 
education in, 24 
examples of eighteenth- century 

ceremonial in, 48 
funerals in, 48 

19 



London {contd.) : 

improvement in condition of 

people of, 54 
in a state of change, 5 
lighting of, 41, 42 
literary group in, 19 
marriage ceremonies in, 47 
merchants in the city of, 22 
middle-class society of, 18, 19 
migration of business men to 
houses in West End of, 31, 32 
mortality in, 23 
people of, without ideals, 57 
pleasure gardens of, 29, 30 
population of, in 1772, 3 
pride and confidence of mer- 
chants of, 21 
religious teaching in, 44. 
schools of, 24 
society in West End of, 4, 16, 

17, 18 
state of the streets of, 28 
tranquillity of, 57 
travel from, 1 5 
typical citizen of, 20 
women of, 50 
change in, 51 
education of, 51 
monotonous lives of, 52, 57 
card-playing among, 52, 53 
brutality of lower class of, 

54 
Loungers in London, their habits, 

36 
Lucas, "A Swan and her 

Friends," 226 
Lyte, " History of Eton College," 

137 



Maitland, " History of London," 

3, 24, 26 
Manchester, 121, 213, 215 

population of, in 1773, 2 note, 

214 note, 219 note 
Mann, Sir Horace, 155, 159 
Marriages, 45, 46, 47 
Mantoux, " La R6volution Indus- 

trielle au XVIIP Siecle," 151, 

186, 187, 188, 194, 204 
March, Earl of, "A Duke and His 

Friends," 260 
Martin, " History of Lloyd's and 

Marine Insurance," 35 
Masefield, " Sea Life in Nelson's 

Time," 245 



290 



INDEX 



Mason, William, Rev., 155 
Massie, J., " A Plan for the Estab- 
lishment of Charity Houses," 
204 
Matlock, 172, 222 
Melcombe, first Baron (Bubb 

Doddington), 143 
Meteyard, " Life of Wedgwood," 

19, 190 
Middle class 

authors who belonged to, 164 
beginning to read books, 147 
characteristics of, 165 
definition of, 148 
Defoe reflects ideas of, 156 
effect of rise of master manu- 
facturers on, 151 
evolution of, 181 
Fanny Burney, a type of 

middle-class girl, 235 
general appearance of, at end 

of century, 180 
how composed, 149 
in London, 18 
increase in wealth of, 152 
indifferent to theological con- 
troversies, 177 
intellectual development of 

women of, 154 
marriages between, and children 

of county landowners, 158 
no objection to Established 

Church, 177 
patrons of artists, 104, 166, 176 
persons on fringe of, 155 
political character of, 165, 180 
representative of English peo- 
ple, 179 
rise of, in eighteenth century, 

147 
significance of growth of, 155 
view of place of women by the, 

172, 173, 175 
want of amusement of, 171 
Wesley and, 178, 179 
Miller, Lady, 227, 263 

collects an intellectual society 

at Bath Easton, 100 
description of her parties, 10 1 
her parties at Bath Easton, 100 
Montagu, Elizabeth, Mrs., 227, 

241, 242, 
her learning, wit, and wealth, 

242 
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 130 
" Her Times," 130 



Montague House, 7 
More, Hannah, 225 
Muir, Ramsay, " A History of 
Liverpool," 123, 217 



" Nabob," the, 18, 68, 129, 154 
Nash, Richard, " Beau," 75 

a gambler, 78, 79 

character of, tj 

close of his influence at Bath, 

75 

code of rules, 75 

early career, 76 

encounter with Wesley, 86, 87 

houses of, in Bath, yj note 

management of society at Bath, 
75. 76 
Naval Officer : 

a popular hero, 250 

as depicted by Fanny Burney, 
243, 255 
by Smollett, 244, 255 

character of, 244, 247, 253 

difficulties of life at sea, 249 

effect of life at sea on, 248 

food of, 254 

goes to sea at early age, 250, 
251, 252 

knowledge of classics, 253 

prize money gained by, 256 

promotion of, 256 

quarters of, at sea, 254 

seamanship of, 254, 255 

type of British hero, 257 
Navy, 245 

cruelty in, 246, 247 

severe discipline in, 252 
Navy Records Society, " Recol- 
lections of James Anthony 
Gardner, Commander, R.N.," 
245. 253 

" Journal of Admiral James," 
252 

" Letters of Sir T. Byam Mar- 
tin," 247 
Nelson, first Viscount, 248, 249, 
250 

" Dispatches and Letters of," 
248 
New provincial citizen, 212, 213 

aims of, 215 

character of, 212, 214, 215, 218, 
219, 222 

pastimes of, 222 

personified change of ideas, 213 



INDEX 



291 



New provincial citizen {contd.) : 
social and municipal reformer, 
218 

Newspapers, 37, 38 

Newton, Rev. John, 264 

Nobility 

acquaintance with continental 

society, 138, 139 
at Eton, 137 note 
at height of influence, 128 
at home in Paris, 145 
at the universities, 136, 137 
chief capitalists of the age, 129 
collectors of pictures, 139, 140, 

141, 142, 174 

consisted of hereditary and 

titled landowners, 128 
conspicuous group, 125 
contempt for the want of cul- 
ture of the squires, 144 
daughters of, 173 
education of, 136 
familiar with foreign literature 

and art, 1 39 
Fanny Burney's views of, 237 
immense influence of, 127 
influence of, in boroughs, 131, 

151 
large patronage of, 134, 135 
mansions of, in London, 7, 32 
mansions of, in the country, 

146 
members of, at accession of 

George III., 127 
morality and religion of, 145 
not obliged, like French nobles, 

to marry early, 145 
on the Grand Tour, 136, 137 
parliamentary influence of, 129 
past influence of, 133 
patronage by, of men of letters, 

142, 143 

position as a governing body, 

135 

preponderates in Cabinets, 134 

recognition by, of parliamentary 
government, 132 

representative of the landed 
interest, 135 

some of, lovers of literature, 143 

summary of character of, 145 

very small class, 12 
Northumberland, first Duke of, 

140 
Norwich, a centre of middle- 
class activity, 153, 221 note 



Oxford, Robert Harley, Earl of, 

23» 143 

Palmer, " Perlustration of Great 

Yarmouth," 221 
Paris, 58, 139 
" Parliamentary Debates," vol, 

XXX., 131 
Peach, " Life and Times of Ralph 

Allen," 89, 95, 216 
Peasant : 

aspect of, varies in different 

parts of England, 280, 281 
comparison of, with artisan, 

270 
condition of, in eighteenth cen- 
tury, 271, 272, 273 
effect of Roundsman system, on 

278 
food of, 276 
hopeless, 276 
Law of Settlement detrimental 

to, 275, 276 
pay of, 273, 282 
relations of, with other classes, 

277, 281 
reliance of, on poor rates, 274, 

27s 

on charity, 277 
thriftless, 276 

victims of social and economical 
changes, 270, 279, 284 
Peel, first Sir Robert, 192, 208 
Picton, " Memorials of Liverpool," 

115. 123 
Pitt, Governor, 154 
Pleasure gardens of London, 29 
" Pleasure, The City of," see Bath 
Poor rate, 275 _________ 

/Pope, Alexander 1 1 —=>-«■ 
at Bath with Bolingbroke, 92 
description of Bath, 63 
description of Prior Park, 92 
friendship with Ralph Allen, 
89, 92, 94 

" Works," 63, 90, 94 ^~-™- 

Portland, third Duke of, 134, 165 
Powys Mrs. Lybbe, 141, 158 note, 
172 
" Diary," 158, 172 
Prior Park (near Bath), 91, 93, 95 
Privateers, 117, 118, 119, 122 
Prize money, 118, 256 

Queensberry, fourth Duke of, 
" Old Q.," 140, 145. 237 



292 



INDEX 



Radcliffe, Ann, 224, 225, 230, 231 

first writer to popularize ro- 
mantic novels, 231 

her romances, 230 

" Posthumous Works," 225 
Raikes, Robert, 216, 217 

Fanny Burney on daughters of, 

51 
Ralf e , ' ' Naval Chronology, ",257 
Reeve, Clara, 231 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 32, 175, 

176 
Richardson, Samuel, 164 
Rigby, Richard, 129 
Rockingham, second Marquis of, 

134, 165, 203 
Roscoe, E. S. and Clergue, Helen, 

" George Selwyn, His Letters 

and His Life," 17, 130 
Roundsman system, 278 

St. James Street, centre of 
fashionable and pohtical so- 
ciety, 4, 17, 18, 62, 128, 211 

St. Vincent, first Earl of, 252 

Sandby, Paul, 166, 175 

Schoolmasters in the Navy, 253, 
254 

" Seaport, The," see Liverpool 

Seeker, Archbishop, 266 

Selwyn, George, 53, 130, 156 

Sermons, 44, 268 

Servants, change of condition of, 
in London, 55 

Seward, Anna, 174, 225, 226, 227, 
228, 229, 230, 231 
" Poetical Works," 229 
poetry of, 226, 229 

Seward, Thomas, Rev., 228 

Sichel, "Life of Sheridan," 96, 131 

Slave Trade, 114, 115 

Smollett, Tobias, 64, 65, 70, 164 
"Humphrey Clinker," 62, 68 

Shelburne, second Earl of, 129, 

143 
Sheridan, Charles, 96 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 82 
at Bath, 95, 96 

brought in as member for Staf- 
ford, 131 
duels of, with Mathews, 98 
his marriage with Miss Linley, 

97 
Smiles, " Lives of Boulton and 
Watt," 152, 189 
** Lives of the Engineers," 197 



Society of Friends of the People, 
on influence of nobility, 130 
Spectator, No. 54, 36 
Squires : 

antagonism between, and 
moneyed men breaking down, 
158 
at Bath, 68, 84 
bought out by manufacturers, 

152 
contempt of nobility for, 144 
differ politically from mer- 
chants, 158 
jealous of nobility, 144, 145 
small rural aristocracy, 1 50 
Squire Western a type of, 144 
types of, in fiction, 105, 144, 

155 
typified by Squire Western and 
Tony Lumpkin, 155 
Stafford, Sheridan's election for, 

131 

Steel, Richard, 157 

Stephen, Leslie, " English Litera^ 
ture and Society in the 
Eighteenth Century," 147 J 

^,^^^149, 266 -— ^ 

Scorer, Anthony Morris, 17 

Stowe, 33 

Streatfield, Sophey, 171, 174 

Strutt, Jedediah, 209 

Stukely, Dr. William, " Itiner- 
arium Curiosum," 1724, 214 

Sunday Schools, 216 note 

Sydney, " England and the Eng- 
lish in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury," 27, 46 

Taverns : 

clubs held in, 35 

dinners in, 40 

large amount of time spent inj 
39 .--^^ 

Theatre, 41 

in the provinces, 220, 221 
Tatler, The, No. 255. 261 
Taylor, " Origin and Growth of 
the English Constitution," 131 
Thames, The : 

description of, 10 

greatly used, 9, 10, 26 
" The Brief and Merry History of 

Great Britain," 27 
Thomson, James, 10, 168 

" The Seasons," 10 
Thrale, Henry, 160, 161, 176 



INDEX 



293 



Thrale, Mrs* (Mrs. Piozzi), 161, 

175. 232 
brings Fanny Burney to Bath, 

99 
description of Bath, 64 
frequent visitor at Bath, 99 
Three Hats, Islington, favourite 

resort in summer, 29 
Townshend, second Viscount, 203 
Toynbee, "Letters of Walpole," 

17, 88 
Travel, 66 note, 171 

difficulty and expense of, 14, 
30, 31 
Tunbridge Wells, 65, 222 
Twining, Thomas, description of 
scenery by, 168 
" Recreations and Studies of 
a Country Clergyman of 
Eighteenth Century," 168 
Tyerman, " Life of Wesley," 265 

Vauxhall Gardens, 12, 21, 29, 128 
Villas, suburban and Thames- 
side, 31 32 
causes of taste for, 33 
Voltaire, his portrait of an Eng- 
lishman of eighteenth cen- 
tury, 20 

Wages : 

in agriculture, 273, 274, 282 
servants', 55 
Walker, " A Review of some Poli- 
tical Events which have oc- 
curred in Manchester in the 
Last Five Years," 220 
Walpole, Horace, 155, 211 
"Castle of Otranto," 231 
dislike of Wesley, 87 

hears him preach at Bath, 87 
letter of, illustrative of Lon- 
don society, 16 
on the Duke of Northumber- 
land's gallery, 140 
Warburton, William, Bishop of 

Gloucester, 89, 177 
Warner, Rev. Richard, 282 

" A Walk through some of the 
Western Counties of Eng- 
land," 284 
Weaving trade, 184, 185 
Wedgwood, Josiah, 151, 152, 199 
a leading figure in the industrial 
revolution, 189, 190 



Wesley, John, 178, 179, 267 
at Bath, 84, 85, 87 
encounter with Beau Nash, 86 
hostility of Church of England 

to, 178 
" Journal," 87 
one of the middle class, 179 
personifies the revolt against le- 
thargy of the Church, 266, 
267 
Walpole' s description of, 87 
Westminster, 5, 11 
Whalley, Rev. T. S., 263 
Wharton, first Duke of, 143, 144 
Whitefield, George, 84, 85 
Wilkinson, John, 191, 192 
Williams, Gomer, " History of 
the Liverpool Pivateers," 123 
Williamson's Liverpool Advertiser, 
July 5, 1774, 113, 114, 119 
Wilson, Richard, 116 
Winchester, " Life of Wesley, " 

147 
Woburn, 146 
Woman of Letters 
character of, 224 
pioneer in feminist movement, 

225 
types of, 225, 231 
uncertain of her position, 224 
Wood, Joseph, 165 

architect and builder at Bath, 

79, 80, 81 
his work, 81 
Wool trade, 185, 187 
Wordsworth, " University So- 
ciety in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury," 137, 261 
Wright, Joseph, " of Derby," 176 
Wright, Thomas, 222 
Wroth, Warwick, " The London 
Pleasure Gardens of the Eigh 
teenth Century," 12, 29 
Wyatt, John, 188 



Yeomen, 150, 207, 271 

migration to manufacturing dis- 
tricts, 204 

transformation of, into the 

manufacturer, 208 
Young, Arthur, 198, 199, 271, 274 

" Farmer's Letters," 271 

" Six Weeks Tour," 274 
Young, Dr. Edward, 143 



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